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

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 the
vCenter Single Sign-On
service to establish an authenticated session with the
vSphere Automation
Endpoint. You send credentials to the
vCenter Single Sign-On
service and receive a SAML token that you use to obtain a session ID from the
vSphere Automation
Endpoint. Alternatively, you can access the
vSphere Automation
APIs in a sessionless manner by including the SAML token in every request that you issue to the
vSphere Automation
Endpoint.
Service Discovery
You use the Lookup Service to discover the endpoint URL for the vCenter Single Sign-On service on the
Platform Services Controller
, the location of the
vCenter Server
instances, and the
vSphere Automation
Endpoint.

Services Installed with
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 same
vCenter Server
instance 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 or
vSphere Automation
resources. The
vSphere Automation
SDKs provide the capability to manage tags programmatically.