vCenter Notes - echadbourne/SYS-350 GitHub Wiki

vCenter Anatomy

Three major parts to a vCenter Deployment (these are bundled in 7.x and higher)

vCenter Server

• Centralized Host management, Configuration, scaling, etc

Platform Services Controller

• Certificate management, authentication, and licensing

Database

• ISOs, VMfiles, templates, snapshots, etc.

Additional vCenter Components

PostgreSQL

• Database Engine

vSphere Web Client (HTML5)

• Used to be flash client in ~6.x

Update Manager/lifecycle manager

Authentication/licensing Services

VMCA - Certificate Authority

vSphere ESXi Dump Collector

• Sends core dump (VMkernel memory) to a network server on critical failure

vSphere AutoDeploy

• Can automatically provision new physical hosts with a specified image, host profiles, data center, cluster settings, script bundles

Platform Services Controller

vCenter Single Sign-On

• Identify domain for vsphere users
• Configure external identity sources

vSphere License Service

• Centralized license management

VMware CA

• ESXi certs stored locally on each host
• VECS serves as a client-side repository for certificate, private keys, and other certificate information