ESXi replaces Service Console (a rudimentary operating system) with a more closely integrated OS.

At normal run-time, the vmkernel was running on the bare computer, and the Linux-based service console ran as the first virtual machine.

[20] In ESX (and not ESXi), the Service Console is a vestigial general purpose operating system most significantly used as bootstrap for the VMware kernel, vmkernel, and secondarily used as a management interface.

Both of these Console Operating System functions are being deprecated from version 5.0, as VMware migrates exclusively to the ESXi model.

[22] The Service Console, for all intents and purposes, is the operating system used to interact with VMware ESX and the virtual machines that run on the server.

Upon displaying a purple diagnostic screen, the vmkernel writes debug information to the core dump partition.

This information, together with the error codes displayed on the purple diagnostic screen can be used by VMware support to determine the cause of the problem.

It was alleged that VMware had misappropriated portions of the Linux kernel,[31][32] and, following a dismissal by the court in 2016, Hellwig announced he would file an appeal.

[33] The appeal was decided February 2019 and again dismissed by the German court, on the basis of not meeting "procedural requirements for the burden of proof of the plaintiff".

[34] In the last stage of the lawsuit in March 2019, the Hamburg Higher Regional Court also rejected the claim on procedural grounds.

There are several differences between the standard dvS and the N1000v; one is that the Cisco switch generally has full support for network technologies such as LACP link aggregation or that the VMware switch supports new features such as routing based on physical NIC load.

However, the main difference lies in the architecture: Nexus 1000v is working in the same way as a physical Ethernet switch does while dvS is relying on information from ESX.

Instructions that perform this extra work, and other activities that require virtualization, tend to lie in operating system calls.

In an unmodified operating system, OS calls introduce the greatest portion of virtualization "overhead".

VMware developed the Virtual Machine Interface for this purpose, and selected operating systems currently[update] support this.