The VMware Edge Compute Stack (ECS) is comprised of the same functional components used in enterprise datacenters for years, now licensed and bundled in a smaller footprint for the edge. The core components and some of the value they provide are discussed in the following sections.
vSphere and ESXi
- For more information about vSphere see the VMware vSphere product page.
- The ESXi hypervisor provides the ability to consolidate applications and virtual machines (VMs) onto shared hardware. It abstracts the physical hardware resources into pools, making them available for consumption and sharing among VMs.
vCenter
- vCenter provides centralized management of VMware ESXi hosts and clusters and enables various key features such as vMotion, Virtual Distributed Switches (vDS), vSAN, DRS, HA and many others.
- For more information about vCenter, see the VMware vCenter product page.
Features for 3-node configurations
The following features are relevant for the 3-node platform configurations, as described in the High availability overview section of this document.
vSAN
vSAN is integrated into the kernel of vSphere and provides the software-defined storage layer. A vSphere cluster is a collection of ESXi hosts configured to share resources. vSAN creates distributed shared storage by aggregating locally attached disks from the hosts that form the vSphere cluster. The following figure shows the vSAN high-level architecture:
vMotion
- Provides the ability to perform live VM migrations:
- Across ESXi hosts in the same (or different) clusters.
- To separate vCenters or locations.
- Simplifies upgrades and maintenance by allowing VMs to move to and from servers during maintenance.
- For more information about vMotion see the VMware vMotion product page.
vSphere High Availability
- Policy-driven HA for virtual machines.
- Monitors ESXi hosts and clusters for various failure types and takes action (for example: restarts VMs on working hosts) if a failure occurs.
- For more information about HA, see How vSphere HA Works.
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler
- Leverages vMotion to automate and schedule VM migrations.
- Identifies optimal placement for a virtual machine within seconds.
- Policy-driven workload balancing can be tuned for equal distribution of workload across nodes in an ESXi cluster.
- For more information about Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), see the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler product page.
Additional ECS components
- Tanzu Kubernetes—VMware's Kubernetes-related product suite
- Tanzu Mission Control—Centralized Kubernetes cluster management
- Edge Network Intelligence—AIOps solution for monitoring and analyzing various edge endpoints