Difference between vSphere, ESXi and vCenter

VMware Inc. is a software company that develops many suites of software products specially for providing various virtualization solutions. There are many cloud products, datacenter products, desktop products and so on.

vSphere is a software suite that comes under data center product. vSphere is like Microsoft Office suite which has many softwares like MS Office, MS Excel, MS Access and so on. Like Microsoft Office, vSphere is also a software suite that has many software components like vCenter, ESXi, vSphere client and so on. So, the combination of all these software components is vSphere. vSphere is not a particular software that you can install and use, “it is just a package name which has other sub components”.

ESXi, vSphere client and vCenter are components of vSphere. ESXi server is the most important part of vSphere. ESXi is the virtualization server. It is type 1 hypervisor. All the virtual machines or Guest OS are installed on ESXi server. To install, manage and access those virtual servers which sit above of ESXi server, you will need other part of vSphere suit called vSphere client or vCenter. Now, vSphere client allows administrators to connect to ESXi servers and access or manage virtual machines. vSphere client is installed on the client machine (e.g. Administrator’s laptop). The vSphere client is used from client machine to connect to ESXi server and do management tasks. So now what is vCenter? Why we need it? Try cloning existing virtual machine using just a vSphere client without vCenter server.

vCenter server is similar to vSphere client but it’s a server with more power. vCenter server is installed on Windows Server or Linux Server. VMware vCenter server is a centralized management application that lets you manage virtual machines and ESXi hosts centrally. vSphere client is used to access vCenter Server and ultimately manage ESXi servers. vCenter server is compulsory for enterprises to have enterprise features like vMotion, VMware High Availability, VMware Update Manager and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). For example, you can easily clone existing virtual machine in vCenter server. So vCenter is another important part of vSphere package. You have to buy vCenter license separately.

The diagram above shows vSphere suite in a more descriptive way. vSphere is a product suite, ESXi is a hypervisor installed on a physical machine. vSphere Client is installed on laptop or desktop PC and is used to access ESXi Server to install and manage virtual machines on ESXi server. vCenter server is installed as virtual machine on top of ESXi server. vCenter server can also be installed on different standalone physical server, but why not virtualize it too right? vCenter server is a vSphere component which is mostly used in large environment where there are many ESXi servers and dozens of virtual machines. The vCenter server is also accessed by vSphere client for management purpose. So, vSphere client is used to access ESXi server directly in small environment. In larger environment, vSphere client is used again to access vCenter server which ultimately manages ESXi server.

You can install vSphere in your PC to get more knowledge of this amazing technology. For more information about VMware you can visit VMware’s Official website.

Create User Mailbox - MS Exchange 2016

There are two options to create User Mailbox in Exchange 2016. You can create mailboxes for users that are already in Active Directory or create new mailboxes that will eventually create associated user account in Active Directory. However you create user mailbox, an active directory user account will be created and the associated mailbox will be created in Exchange server. I already have user accounts created in Active Directory so I will just create the mailbox.

Log on to Exchange Admin Center (EAC).

Click recipients in the features pane. Select mailboxes tab. Click + “Add” and select User mailbox.

Choose Existing user if you already have user account created in Active Directory. If not, you can choose New user and start filling the boxes which will create new user in Active Directory. Click Browse to browse associated user account from active directory.

Select the user account from the list to create it’s mailbox.

Click more option.

Under mailbox database click browse to specify custom mailbox database. Select the database. Click OK. You must create database prior to this step. Click save.

As you can see above, the user account is now created. You can also configure other mailbox types like, shared mailbox, linked mailbox and resource mailbox.

Move Mailbox from One Database to Other - MS Exchange 2016

Log on to Exchange Admin Center (EAC). Click recipients in the features pane. Select migration tab. Click + and click Move to a different database option.

New migration batch page opens.

You have two options to specify users you want to move. You can use CSV file or choose users from the list. The option, select the users that you want to move is select by default. I will choose the default option. Click + “Add”.

Chooser users that you want to move to new mailbox database. You can select multiple users with shift+left-click or ctrl+left-click. Here, I will select all mailboxes including default mailboxes. Click add. Click OK.

Click next.

Type name of migration batch. Under Archive, choose the first option as second and third option is not valid for Exchange 2016. Under Target Database, click Browse and choose the destination database. Click next.

Specify administrator to be contacted once the migration is complete. You can choose whether the migration batch should start automatically or manually. I choose automatically. Click new to start the migration. The migration will now start.

You can monitor the migration as shown above. Click view details to view more details of the migration.

As you can see above the mailbox DWalda@mustbegeek.com has completed migration.

In this way you can move mailbox from one database to other in Exchange 2016. You can also move mailboxes from Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2016.