I'm learning VMware Workstation and VM ESXi. Can I ask: Is "Restore and backup hosts" different from "Restore and backup virtual machines"? Or they are same?
They’re actually different things.
Backing up/restoring VMs is all about the actual virtual machines — their virtual disks, config files, OS, apps, data, etc. Basically, everything inside the VM itself. You'd usually do this to protect the actual "computers" you're running.
Backing up/restoring hosts (like ESXi) is more about the configuration of the host system — things like networking setup, storage mappings, host settings, etc. It doesn’t include the VMs running on it. So if your ESXi host dies or needs to be rebuilt, a host backup helps you get it back to the same config, but you’d still need separate backups of the VMs themselves.
Similar idea, but totally different targets.