VMware Inc. is a company that develops software for server virtualization. It is the undisputed market leader with a large gap from its closest competitors.
The company’s main product is vSphere, industrial-grade virtualization platform. The software components of this platform include ESXi hypervisor and vCenter Server management solution.
The ESXi hypervisor is installed on the physical server and allows you to create virtual machines on it.
vCenter Server is an application for centralized management of the entire VMware virtual infrastructure. With vCenter Server, you can monitor all virtual machines, control all hosts and clusters from a single console.
vCenter Server software is distributed under a paid license only. For small virtual structures with no more than 60 virtual machines, vSphere Essentials license is suitable. If you purchase Standalone vCenter Server license, you can manage a virtual infrastructure with up to 25,000 virtual machines and up to 2,000 hosts.