What is VMWARE vSphere?

Question

Virtualization

The situation is this. There are 2 groups of servers: 3 blades for rendering and 2 servers for other tasks (Word, Excel, 1C, etc.). Within each group, a certain number of VMs will be raced using the VMware hypervisor. And recently I was told that there is such a thing - VMWARE vSphere, and they added that it is better to run this thing not in a VM, but on a separate physical server. From here, I have a few questions:
Do I need to install the OS before installing the hypervisor on the server?
What is VMWARE vSphere, what does it do and why a separate server?
And I also can’t understand how applications work inside each VM: is a separate application installed on each VM, or is it enough to install it on the storage system and the VMs will load it from there (provided that the same application is used)?

Answer 1

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform, it consists of ESXi hypervisors, a vCenter server and a bunch of various handy things to automate the management of the entire infrastructure, more details www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/.Most likely you mean the VMware vCenter server. This is the control center for the entire virtual infrastructure, it comes both as a Windows application and as a ready-made VM. In your case, as far as I understand, there are several physical servers, so nothing prevents you from deploying it as a virtual machine and configuring High Availability for this VM, that is, even if the physical host fails, the VM will automatically start on another. I also recommend that you immediately create and configure a Distibuted vSwitch so that you do not experience network problems when migrating a VM from one host to another, for more details - www.vmware.com/en/products/vsphere/features-distri... .
Do I need to install the OS before installing the hypervisor on the server? The ESXi hypervisor is installed on bare metal.
And I also can’t understand how applications work inside each VM: is a separate application installed on each VM, or is it enough to install it on the storage system and the VMs will load it from there (provided that the same application is used)? It is not entirely clear how you imagine installing an application on a storage system. On the storage system, you can create a disk, connect it to the VM, and install applications on it, in turn. If you use VMs with the same installed applications, then no one prevents you from simply cloning one initially configured VM.

Answer 2

I would start with the requirements. What do we want: flexibility to deploy and manage virtual benches, isolation for security / usability, fault tolerance / redundancy ... ?