About this course

This course teaches you to manage virtual machines in a VMware vSphere environment. vSphere is a software suite that includes components like ESXi.

You should have a basic understanding of computers. You should know how to download and install a program in Windows and some basic knowledge of system administration (configuring IP addresses, connecting to the Internet, installing Windows, etc.). If you don’t have much experience with virtualization.

A virtual machine is a software computer that, like a physical computer, runs an operating system and applications. The hypervisor serves as a platform for running virtual machines and allows for the consolidation of computing resources.

Each virtual machine contains its own virtual, or software-based, hardware, including a virtual CPU, memory, hard disk, and network interface card.

ESXi is the hypervisor in a vSphere environment. The hypervisor is installed on physical or virtual hardware in a virtualized data center, and acts as a platform for virtual machines. The hypervisor provides physical hardware resources dynamically to virtual machines to support the operation of the virtual machines. The hypervisor allows virtual machines to operate with a degree of independence from the underlying physical hardware. For example, a virtual machine can be moved from one physical host to another, or its virtual disks can be moved from one type of storage to another, without affecting the functioning of the virtual machine.

This tutorial is designed for people with some experience in the world of virtualization. Although the course presumes some knowledge about computer systems in general, it is customized for beginners. This course can also be used in preparation for the VCP-DCV (VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization) certification.

Virtualization is awesome, it’s been the standard for enterprises for many years and although containers are gaining interest, virtual machines remain the go-to for any business; you’d be either crazy or incompetent not to go down this route in most scenarios. This post will go through the very basics of setting up and using ESXi.

There are many ways to virtualize, some free and some not, but in this post I will be going through one in particular, VMware’s ESXi. ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor, meaning it has access to the hardware it’s running on, and the virtual machines running directly on top of the hypervisor. A type 2 hypervisor is one that has an OS between it and the hardware, for example, VMware Workstation running on Windows. There really is nothing wrong with running VMs inside of Windows, however, to get the full performance of the machine and not have any interference it is best to run a type 1 hypervisor to remove the intermediate OS level in-between.