Glossary

• Management platform In this document, the management platform refers to NSphere and its core management component CVM. It is used for unified management and intelligent scheduling of virtualized resources.

• Root user The root user has all permissions to the system as well as full access to all resources. For a public cloud, the root user is the resource pool administrator of the carrier. For a private cloud, the root user is the IT administrator of the enterprise or organization.

• Cloud resource Cloud resources are cloud resource infrastructure hardware resources, including servers, network devices, and storage systems.

• Virtual machine A virtual machine (VM) emulates a physical computer system and runs on a physical server, which is also called a host. A VM has its own operating system (called guest OS), CPUs, memory, hard disk drives, and NICs as does a physical computer system except that all these resources are virtual. Multiple VMs can run with different guest OSs (Windows or Linux for example) on the same physical server and share its hardware resources.

• Host Hosts are physical servers on which VMs run.

• Cluster Clusters are groups of computing resources, including hosts and VMs. Clusters provide the ease of management and high availability in a virtualized environment. The resources in a cluster back up each other and can be managed as if they were a single unit. When a host fails, the VMs on that host can migrate to the remaining hosts in the cluster to ensure business continuity.

• Data center Data centers are sets of clusters and hosts that are not in a cluster.

• VM template A VM template is a replica of a VM, from which multiple VMs can be bulk-created with the same hardware configuration and functionality.

• Virtual switch