Within the Virtualization solution, different virtualization platforms such as VMware or Hyper-V are configured as hypervisors (also called virtualization clients).
Each hypervisor has one or more access nodes (also called VSA proxies) that manage backups, restores, and other operations. The requirements for access nodes vary for each hypervisor.
Different hypervisors use a common framework that includes the following entities:
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Virtual machines (VMs) are software implementations of computers. Some hypervisors use different terminology for VMs, such as instances, or use a different construct such as applications or containers to reflect the abstraction of workloads from the underlying operating system, but virtual machine or VM is used generically to refer to virtualized entities. You can view all of the virtual machines across the Virtualization solution under the Virtualization Virtual machines tab.
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VM groups identify a group of virtual machines to be protected. For some hypervisors, VM groups might have a different name, such as instance groups, to reflect the terminology that is used to refer to virtualized machines in the underlying virtualization platform, but the term VM group is used generically to refer to those groups. Likewise, the operations that you can perform on a VM group and the methods for performing those operations, are similar across all hypervisors. You can view all of the VM groups across the Virtualization solution under the Virtualization VM groups tab.
The topics within this section provide information that is common to all hypervisors.