VMware ESXi bare-metal (native) - VMware ESX and ESXi are bare-metal embedded hypervisors, built on a Linux kernel, and run directly on server hardware without requiring an underlying OS. SapphireIMS support VM hypervisors inventory with basic information along with guest mapping using VI SDK API. But if extended inventory is needed, SapphireIMS should be able to discover and collect relevant information for this if WBEM/SMI-S is enabled and we don’t support SSH mode for data collection as of now.
Hyper-V bare-metal (native) - This is type-1 hypervisor which runs light weight version software based such as Hyper-V Server 2008 based windows 2008 server with minimal roles and directly interact with hardware. Off-the shelf it not supported in SapphireIMS but can be supported using WMI.
XenServer bare-metal (native) - ZEN is a Type 1 hypervisor that runs directly on the host hardware (“bare metal”). After the hypervisor loads, it starts the privileged management domain – the control domain (dom0), which contains a minimal Linux environment. SapphireIMS support VM hypervisors inventory with basic information along with guest mapping using XEN SDK API however we don’t support extended inventory through WBEM/SMI-S or SSH.
Hosted hypervisors - are of type-2 and are the software that is running within a conventional OS (such as Windows or Linux) and can be supported with regular protocols like WMI,SSH without any hassles. e.g: Oracle VM VirtualBox, Windows Virtual PC, etc.