During my VCDX journey, I searched long and hard for a diagram that showed the components of VMware vSphere ESXi in a “big picture” to enhance my understanding. The closest I could find was in the VMware vSphere: Optimise and Scale training manual (page 66 – Image also here Section 4.1), but it lacked detail. So I collated all that I could find into this diagram, which is a very handy one to have when troubleshooting vSphere issues. (#VCDX HINT, HINT!)
This diagram illustrates the four fundamental layers of vSphere (click on image for the high resolution version):
- Guest Operating System software (VM)
- ESXi Hypervisor software with Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), CPU Scheduler, Memory Allocation, Network stack and Storage stack
- Host Server hardware with pCPU, pRAM, Network and Storage interfaces/components
- Backend – Network and Storage systems
The vSphere Management and Automation layers (vCenter, vCOPs, vCD, vCAC, etc.) are deliberately excluded to keep it simple.
The following sites provided the details of each stack and should be used for additional information:
- VMware vCloud Networking Poster
- VMware vSphere: Optimise and Scale Training Course
- Interpreting esxtop statistics
- Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere Part 1
- To which host-level latency statistic is the SIOC congestion threshold related?
- ESX Disk I/O Stack
vcdx133.com 
[…] is also worth being able to describe the vSphere stack as described in this blog post; in particular being able to draw it on a whiteboard very quickly and use it for the silos […]
[…] This is a high level component view of NSX for vSphere. For a detailed diagram of vSphere ESXi, Tech101 – VMware vSphere ESXi. […]
[…] able to describe the vSphere stack (if applicable, otherwise AHV or Hyper-V) as described in this blog post; in particular being able to draw it on a whiteboard very quickly and use it for the silos […]