Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > White Papers > Microsoft SQL Server with Dell EMC and VMware Technology > Introduction
VMware vSphere is an efficient and secure platform for virtualization and the cloud. vSphere core components are VMware vCenter Server and the VMware ESXi hypervisor.
vCenter Server is a unified platform for managing vSphere environments. It features ease of deployment, extensibility onto the public cloud, and proactive optimization of resources for maximum efficiency.
ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor that is installed directly onto physical servers. ESXi is more efficient than hosted architectures because it has direct access to and control of underlying resources. The ESXi hypervisor has a small footprint of 150 MB, minimizing space requirements and security threats. It provides reliable performance for different application workloads and supports VM configurations of up to 128 vCPUs, 6 TB of RAM, and 120 devices.