Newbie virtualisation/vmware confusion

[jatman]

Hi all,

This is a newbie question so please don't be alarmed.*

In my organisation we have a mixture of freebsd, red hat and windows servers all serving individual services e.g. web, print, dns, applications etc.* I know I can have one or a few beefy machines running nearly all the individual services as virtual machines/services, but I have some confusion over this.

q1 - What exact software do I use to "create" these virtual machines?* All the different names of the software are confusing me e.g. vsphere, vmware visor.* * Keep it simple, which one do I use?

I want to be able to create virtual machines to represent all the individual servers I have right now and easily create one after the other.

I want to be able to recreate virtual machines quickly in the event of a failure of a vm.

If I want a new server to test some stuff on I want to be able to make one quickly and play with it.

q2 - Can I have virtual machines with different operating systems on the main machine e.g. unix, windows, etc?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated, please keep it simple as I am already confused.

Suggestions on recommended base os and versions too please.

Thanks

Jat

[WebMaster]

Hi Jatman, thanks for joining Virtualization.net and welcome!

q1 - What exact software do I use to "create" these virtual machines?* All the different names of the software are confusing me e.g. vsphere, vmware visor.* * Keep it simple, which one do I use?

Well, vmware vSphere is name of the product which consists of: ESXi, vCenter, etc.

ESXi is the OS which you install on a server, its the underlying platform which controls the hardware (memory, CPU, networking, etc.).

vCenter allows you to manage multiple ESXi hosts from central admin console.

vSphere client allows you to connect to vCenter server OR the ESXi host directly.

You have different options available when using vSphere client to connect to vCenter and ESXi hosts directly. But in either case, the vSphere client allows you to create virtual machines or clone physical servers into VMs.

q2 - Can I have virtual machines with different operating systems on the main machine e.g. unix, windows, etc?

Absolutely. You can have almost any OS running as a VM.