Difference between VMware ESX and ESXi

It's been a long debate that everyone has been asked by what is the difference between ESX and ESXi. Most of the admins would have asked this question during interviews and also asked by new learners of VMware virtualization. I decided to post on the topic to give architectural difference always as to compare the different level capabilities between ESX & ESXi.
 
What is VMware ESX ?

ESX (Elastic Sky X) is the VMware’s enterprise server virtualization platform. In ESX, VMkernel is the virtualization kernel which is managed by a console operating system which is also called as Service console. Which is linux based and its main purpose is it to provide a Management interface for the host and lot of management agents and other thrid party software agents are installed on the service console to provide  the functionalists like hardware management and monitoring of ESX hypervisor.                                                                                                                                         


What is VMware ESXi ?

ESXi (Elastic sky X Integrated) is also the VMware’s enterprise server virtualization platform. In ESXi, Service console is removed. All the VMware related agents and third party agents such as management and monitoring agents can also run directly on the VMkernel. ESXi is ultra-thin architecture which is highly reliable and its small code-base allows it to be more secure with less codes to patch. ESXi uses Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) instead of a service console to perform management of ESXi server. ESXi installation will happen very quickly as compared to ESX installation.

Capability	ESX	ESXi
Service Console	Present	Removed
Troubleshooting performed via	Service Console	ESXi Shell
Active Director Authentication	Enabled	Enabled
Secure Syslog	Not Supported	Supported
Management Network	Service Console Interface	VMKernel Interface
Jumbo Frames	Supported	Supported
Hardware Montioring	3 rd Party agents installed in Service console	Via CIM Providers
Boot from SAN	Supported in ESX	Supported in ESXi
Software patches and updates	Needed as smilar to linux operation system	Few pacthes because of small footprint and more secure
vSphere web Access	Only experimental	Full managenet capability via vSPhere web client
Locked Down Mode	Not present	Present . Lockdown mode prevents remote users to login to the host
Scripted Installtion	Supported	Supported
vMA Support	Yes	Yes
Major Administration command-line Command	esxcfg-	esxcli
Rapid deployment via Auto Deploy	Not supported	Supported
Custom Image creation	Not supported	Supported
VMkernel Network Used for	vMotion,Fault Tolarance,Stoarge Connectivity	Management Network , vMotion, Fault Tolarance, Stoarge Connectivity, ISCSI port binding