Introduction to virtual infrastructure – virtual machines, disks, CPUs, memory, switches, network, and storage

Let us get a better understanding of what a virtual machine is, and how ESXi interacts with the four major components: CPU, memory, network, and storage.

Virtual machines

A virtual machine (VM) is a set of virtual hardware on which a supported guest operating system and its applications run.

A VM is also a set of discrete files. Following are some of the files that make up a virtual machine; except for the log files, all the VM files start with the VM's name (<VM-Name>):

  1. A configuration file (.vmx).
  2. One or more virtual disk files. The first virtual disk has files <VM_name>.vmdk and <VM_name>-flat.vmdk.
  3. A file containing the virtual machine's ...

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