New to VSphere hypervisor and need help with following doubts:
1. I am running a free version of Vsphere hypervisor. Not sure what all features are not there in the free version of Vsphere hypervisor that's there in paid version. There seems to be different Vsphere server products and not sure what the differences are between free version and other paid versions. Is there a summary of difference between these different Vsphere products and features?
2. Have some VM instances on the vsphere hypervisor each running some version of Guest OS - mostly different Linux distros. Have some network applications thats running in this VM instances that are running RHEL Guest OS. I am new to VSphere developer APIs and wondering how this APIs can be useful and what is an industry standard way of developing and distributing virtual network appliance applications if we have to automate the deployment installation and configuration of VM instance and applications that run inside the guest OS.
3. What virtual networking APIs are available for creating and configuring virtual networks (virtual interfaces, virtual switches/L2 properties etc.) in hypervisor and VM instances. How the APIs are supposed to work? Applications using these APIs run in a VM instance running in Guest OS environment context (say Linux) and talks to hypervisor directly for various hardware related configurations or monitoring? Are these APIs tied to specific Guest OS or works in any Guest OS environment?
-RP