vSphere ESXi Hypervisor
VMware vSphere 5.1 is the latest release of the flagship virtualization platform from VMware. VMware vSphere, known in many circles as “ESXi”, for the name of the underlying hypervisor architecture, is a state of the art bare-metal hypervisor.
As a bare-metal hypervisor, vSphere installs directly on top of your physical server and partitions it into multiple virtual machines. Each virtual machine shares the same physical resources as the other virtual machines and they can all run at the same time. Unlike other hypervisors, all management functionality of vSphere is possible through remote management tools. There is no underlying operating system, reducing the install footprint to less than 150MB. vSphere is the most advanced hypervisor on the market with a number of unique capabilities and features including:
- A small disk footprint for reduced attack surface and fewer patches
- OS independence and hardened drivers
- Advanced memory management with the ability to de-duplicate or compress pages
- Advanced storage management with an integrated cluster file system
- High I/O scalability to eliminate I/O bottlenecks
For more information on the vSphere ESXi hypervisor, visit the ESXi Information Center
