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Business Management

VMware also still offers a tool suite in the management tools area, operating under the names IT Business Management, but not as part the vCloud Suite. The current suite version 7.5 is designed to support companies by measuring the quality and cost of their private cloud. Therefore, the "IT Benchmarking" module it contains allows a CIO to compare their department's performance with other IT organizations with the help of a series of key figures.

vSphere

All remaining tools used for an array of different tasks are gathered under the name "Cloud Infrastructure." Some of these tools are well known to users, but a few are new, including tools to integrate vSphere resources into logical data centers. The basis of all features in the VMware cloud stack is vSphere, the software for virtualizing data centers, which in turn is based on the ESXi hypervisor and allows complete remote administration via a SOAP API with the aforementioned tools.

In the vSphere virtualization concept, the ESXi systems, physical hosts, and storage resources form a resource pool from which the required data center workloads are dynamically allocated in the form of virtual machines or clusters. For example, ESXi hosts provide VMFS (virtual machine filesystem), which is normally used with shared storage (NAS/SAN).

In vSphere, VMware distinguishes between the editions of vSphere with Operations Management, all of which are administered through a vCenter server and are used as the foundation of data center virtualization and the pure vSphere Hypervisor, available for free. By the way, there has not been an ESX since vSphere 5.0, just the commercial or free ESXi version.

vCloud Director

vCloud Director is the component in VMware's portfolio that divides the total pool of resources into logical units – the so-called "virtual data center," which in turn can operate dynamically from the pool of virtualized hardware.

vCloud Director flexibly allows administrators to map out existing resources to business needs in their IT departments, even while all virtual data centers remain isolated from each other; vCloud Director allows multiclient-capable supervision of IT resources. In turn, vCloud Connector is distributed with vCloud Director and is used in, among other things, the new vCloud Hybrid Service to connect internal and external resources from the public cloud.