# Server

Either a Physical Server or a Virtual Cluster Server.

A Physical Server in terms of Avantra is either:

- a real server that runs a copy of the supported operating systems

- a system virtual machine (or hardware virtual machine) running its own operating system (the so-called guest operating system)

- a partition in operating system-level virtualization (virtual environment, virtual private server, guest, zone, container, jail, etc.).

In other words, if it looks like a real server from the point of view of its users, it is called a Physical Server in Avantra.

If you want to manage or monitor a Physical Server you need to install an Avantra Agent on it.The same holds true if you want to define an End Point on it.

In Avantra, a Physical Server refers to anything that has an operating system installed and running an Avantra Agent. In the Cloud context, these are usually “instances” or “virtual machines”.

For VMware, installations on ESXi servers are supported as well as the cloud offerings VMware Engine on GCP and VMware Cloud on AWS. Even if installations on ESXi are not strictly cloud resources, Avantra handles them in the same way.

Avantra automatically detects if it is running in a Cloud Server. If so, and if Cloud Authentication is configured properly, you can start and stop Cloud Servers from the UI, within Maintenance Windows, and using Notifications.