Components and Services
of a Virtual Environment
Starting with
vSphere 6.0, the deployment of the virtual environment consists of two major
components that provide different sets of services, the VMware
Platform
Services Controller
and
vCenter
Server
.
You can deploy
vCenter
Server
with an embedded or external
Platform
Services Controller
.
Services Installed
with
Platform
Services Controller
Platform
Services Controller
The
Platform
Services Controller
group of infrastructure services contains
vCenter Single
Sign-On
, License Service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate
Authority. The services installed with the
Platform
Services Controller
are common to the entire virtual environment. A
Platform
Services Controller
can be connected to one or more
vCenter
Server
instances. In a deployment that consists of more than one
Platform
Services Controller
, the data of each service is replicated across all
Platform
Services Controller
instances.
In
vSphere
Automation
API client applications, you use the
vCenter Single
Sign-On
and the Lookup Service on the
Platform
Services Controller
to provide a range of functionality.
- Authentication and Session Management
- You use thevCenter Single Sign-Onservice to establish an authenticated session with thevSphere AutomationEndpoint. You send credentials to thevCenter Single Sign-Onservice and receive a SAML token that you use to obtain a session ID from thevSphere AutomationEndpoint. Alternatively, you can access thevSphere AutomationAPIs in a sessionless manner by including the SAML token in every request that you issue to thevSphere AutomationEndpoint.
- Service Discovery
- You use the Lookup Service to discover the endpoint URL for the vCenter Single Sign-On service on thePlatform Services Controller, the location of thevCenter Serverinstances, and thevSphere AutomationEndpoint.
Services Installed
with
vCenter
Server
vCenter
Server
vCenter
Server
is a central administration point for
ESXi
hosts. The
vCenter
Server
group of services contains
vCenter
Server
,
vSphere Web
Client
, Inventory Service,
vSphere®Auto Deploy™,
vSphere®ESXi™ Dump Collector, VMware
vSphere® Syslog Collector on Windows and VMware vSphere Syslog
Service for the
.
vCenter
Server
also provides services that you can access through the
vSphere
Automation
Endpoint.
- Content Library Service
- You can use the Content Library Service to share VM templates, vApp templates, and other files across the software-defined data center. You can create, share, and subscribe to content libraries on the samevCenter Serverinstance or on a remote instance. This promotes consistency, compliance, efficiency, and automation in deploying workloads at scale. By using content libraries, you can also create OVF packages from virtual machines and virtual appliances in hosts, resource pools, and clusters. You can then use the OVF packages to provision new virtual machines in hosts, resource pools, and clusters.
- Tagging Service
- This service supports the definition of tags that you can associate with vSphere objects orvSphere Automationresources. ThevSphere AutomationSDKs provide the capability to manage tags programmatically.