ESX and ESXi are bare metal hypervisors, unlike KVM which is kind of like a quasi-bare metal hypervisor which happens to sit in the Linux kernel. ESX has been EOL'd, however it relied on something called the "Console OS" to bootstrap itself until the vmkernel would take over and start scheduling tasks. The Console OS was actually a modified Red Hat Advanced Server (later Enterprise Server) instance which once the system was booted would act as a kind of "privileged guest". You could log in to it and do sysadmin-y tasks like add users, install RPMs etc.
ESXi, on the other hand, was written to do away with the Console OS entirely, but it still has a fairly rudimentary shell. Many of the utilities are based on busybox and the idea is it should be stripped down with only really minimal functionality. It also sported something called the Direct Connect UI (DCUI) which is a curses based interface for doing things like settings up an admin password, reviewing logs and changing security settings.
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ESX and ESXi are bare metal hypervisors, unlike KVM which is kind of like a quasi-bare metal hypervisor which happens to sit in the Linux kernel. ESX has been EOL'd, however it relied on something called the "Console OS" to bootstrap itself until the vmkernel would take over and start scheduling tasks. The Console OS was actually a modified Red Hat Advanced Server (later Enterprise Server) instance which once the system was booted would act as a kind of "privileged guest". You could log in to it and do sysadmin-y tasks like add users, install RPMs etc.
ESXi, on the other hand, was written to do away with the Console OS entirely, but it still has a fairly rudimentary shell. Many of the utilities are based on busybox and the idea is it should be stripped down with only really minimal functionality. It also sported something called the Direct Connect UI (DCUI) which is a curses based interface for doing things like settings up an admin password, reviewing logs and changing security settings.
Thanks for the clarification.