vSphere Foundation and Basics

As a VMware administrator or a VMware engineer you need to have a good knowledge about the basics and the foundation components of the vSphere platform. Here I would like to compare some vSphere product versions and basic components such as port numbers, vcenter versions, requirements, etc.

This post basically targeting to the vSphere 5.5 and this post will be updating in the future. I know if you are en expert you might know about these basics but if you are a beginner it’s best place to start.

As I explained in one of my previous post vSphere is a software suite which you can use to provide a virtualized datacenter platform to your infrastructure.

vSphere is a per CPU socket and vRam Entitlement software suite. Basically there are three types of licences available for vCenters.

Then What is vCenter?

vCenter is a centralized management tool that you can use to manage vmware hosts and VMs across the multiple Hosts. You can manage several features such as “High Availability (HA) , “Distributed Resource Scheduler”(DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT), Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS), etc. We will discuss these topics in the future.

Here I would like to compare the vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise + licences and features. (vSphere advanced is no longer available), also there are two types of vCenter editions

vCenter Foundation – Can manage up to 3 Hosts
vCenter Standard

	Standard	Enterprise	Enterprise +
Overview	Server Consolidation and there is no planned down time	Powerful and efficient power management	Policy based datacenter solution
Product Component
Processor Entitlement	Per 1 CPU	Per 1 CPU	Per 1 CPU
vRAM Entitlement	24 GB	32 GB	48 GB
vCPU Entitlement	8 way	8 way	32 way
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for vmware	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
vMotion	Cross vSwitch	Cross vSwitch	Cross vSwitch/Cross vCenters- Long distance
Storage vMotion	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
High Availability	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Data Protection	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Fault Tolerance	2-vCPU	2-vCPU	4-vCPU
vShield Endpoint	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
vSphere Replication	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Hot Add	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Virtual Volumes	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Storage Policy Based Managements	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Big Data Extensions		Compatible	Compatible
Virtual Serial Port Connector		Compatible	Compatible
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) Distributed Power Management (DPM)		Compatible	Compatible
Storage DRS			Compatible
Storage IO Control			Compatible
Network IO Control			Compatible
Flash Read Cache			Compatible
Content Library	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Storage APIs for Array Integration, Multipathing	Compatible	Compatible	Compatible
Distributed Switch			Compatible
Host Profiles and Auto Deploy			Compatible

Minimum Requirements for vSphere 5.0 vCenter Server

CPU – two 64-bit CPU or one 64-bit dual-core CPU
Memory – Minimum 4GB, if the database is also installed more memory will be required
Storage – Minimum 4GB of space required , if database is also installed more storage will be required
Better performance with 1GB of network connection
Operating Systems :
- Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter 64-bit editions with SP2
- Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter 64-bit editions with SP1
- Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter 64-bit Editions with SP2
- Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter 64-bit Editions
- Windows server 2012
Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 Framework
Microsoft Windows Installer 4.5 (If using SQL 2008 R2 Express)

Important Port Numbers for vSphere Communication

80/443 – vCenter Web Access
902 – VM Heartbeat Management
8080/8443 – Web Services and HTTPS Web Services
389 – for LDAP
636 – vCenter Linked mode
60099 – Web Service change service notification port
10443 – vCenter Inventory Service HTTPS
10109 – vCenter Inventory Service Management
10111 – vCenter Inventory Service Linked Mode Communications

vCenter types

Sometimes you may aware that there are two types of vCenters available

Windows Based vCenter
SUSE Linux based vCenter Appliance (vCSA)

vCSA is a pre-configured vCenter server appliance which you can use directly in your VMware environment. If you choose to use this vCSA you don’t need to worry about the installation and configuration of the server from the scratch, all you need to do is import the server Appliance to a available host and assign an IP Address to the server.