Compute Servers

Industry standard x86 servers that run ESXi on the bare metal.
ESXi software provides resources for and runs the virtual machines.
Each compute server is referred to as a standalone host in the virtual environment.
You can group a number of similarly configured servers with connections to the same network and storage subsystems to provide an aggregate set of resources in the virtual environment, called a cluster.

Storage networks and
arrays

Fibre Channel SAN arrays, iSCSI SAN arrays, and NAS arrays are widely used storage technologies supported by VMware vSphere to meet different datacenter storage needs.
The storage arrays are connected to and shared between groups of servers through storage area networks. This arrangement allows aggregation of the storage resources and provides more flexibility in provisioning them to virtual machines.

IP networks

Each compute server can have multiple physical network adapters to provide high bandwidth and reliable networking to the entire VMware vSphere datacenter.

vCenter Server

vCenter Server provides a single point of control to the datacenter. It provides essential datacenter services such as access control, performance monitoring, and configuration.
It unifies the resources from the individual computing servers to be shared among virtual machines in the entire datacenter. It does this by managing the assignment of virtual machines to the computing servers and the assignment of resources to the virtual machines within a given computing server based on the policies that the system administrator sets.
Computing servers continue to function even in the unlikely event that vCenter Server becomes unreachable. Servers can be managed separately and continue to run the virtual machines assigned to them based on the resource assignment that was last set.

Management clients

VMware vSphere provides several interfaces for datacenter management and virtual machine access. These interfaces include VMware vSphere Client (vSphere Client), vSphere Web Client for access through a web browser, or vSphere Command-Line Interface (vSphere CLI).