Summary

Once ESXi is installed on a server, connected to your network, and configured, it can be added to vCenter Server so that you can manage it.

ESXi abstracts physical storage from virtual machines by providing host-level storage virtualization. There are two types of physical storage: local and networked.

In VMware terminology, target means a single storage unit that can be accessed by a host. LUN or device is a logical volume that can be used by a host; in other words, it's a space on the target. Therefore, a target may contain one or more LUNs. Datastores are logical containers similar to filesystems that hide differences of each storage device from virtual machines.

With ESXi, it's possible to use more than one physical path for data transfer between a host and an external storage. This technique is called multipathing, and it allows administrators to maintain a constant connection between hosts and storage to ensure uptime in case of a failure.

Thin provisioning is a method of allocating...