What is a “VMware Host” and “VMware Guest”?
I’m going to make a couple of assumptions in this post to help those who are researching these terms.
First of all let’s discuss what I think you mean by “VMware Host”.
This is actually what’s really known as an EXSi or ESX Host.
It’s the physical server that has the VMware OS (Hypervisor) running on it that gets carved up into virtual servers (VMs).
These VMs are also known as guests, which leads me to the next point.
Secondly, what I think is meant by”VMware Guest”.
It’s the virtual machine that’s created within the ESXi Host.
The guest is normally called a VM, or VM server, or virtual server.
It’s a slice of resources (memory, CPU, disk space) that VMware and their virtualization technology magic creates.
The Conclusion…
An ESXi Host can be carved into many VMs that each have their own operating system running separately from each other within a single ESXi Host.
So basically the VMware Host is the ESXi Host and the VMware Guest is the VM.
Mystery solved!
If you still have questions please post them in the comments…
Thanks!
