Glossary

There are lots of sites and blogs out there that provide a glossary of terms and acronyms, including the official VMware glossary. Some of these are quite extensive and technical, so I’ve tried to include all the common terms with ‘plain English’ descriptions to help those new to VMware understand what they mean.

Cluster A collection of hosts with aggregation of CPU and memory resources.
Console Window Interact with the guest operating system, even if the virtual network is disconnected.
Datastore Physical storage used by virtual machines.
DRS The Distributed Resource Scheduler balances computing workloads with available resources.
ESX Virtualisation software that does not run on top of another operating system.
ESXi Free virtualisation software that does not run on top of another operating system with reduced functionality.
Guest The operating system that runs in a virtual machine.
Host The operating system that has direct control of the hardware. 
Hypervisor Software that controls virtual machines and manages resources.
Resource Pool A partition of memory and CPU resources from a single host or cluster reserved for groups of servers or different purposes
Snapshot The state of a virtual machine at a specific point in time.
.VMDK File Files used as hard disks for virtual machines.
vMotion The migration of live virtual machines from one physical server to another without service interruption.
vSwitch A virtual switch that works like a layer-2 physical switch. Each server has its own virtual switches.
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