💠VMware

What VMware vSphere is — the relationship between ESXi hypervisors and vCenter Server, the editions and licensing model, and the key optional components like vSAN and Tanzu that extend the core platform.

How vCenter Server Appliance works — the Linux-based appliance that replaced Windows vCenter, its deployment sizing options, how vCenter HA provides active/passive redundancy, and how Enhanced Linked Mode links multiple vCenter instances into a single management view.

How an ESXi host is structured — the VMkernel that abstracts hardware for virtual machines, the management interfaces available at the console and over the network, lockdown modes that restrict access for security, and host profiles that enforce configuration consistency across many hosts.

How vSphere virtualises network connectivity — comparing vSphere Standard Switches and Distributed Switches, how VMkernel adapters carry management and storage traffic, VLAN tagging modes that connect VMs to physical networks, and NIC teaming policies that distribute load and provide redundancy.

How vSphere connects to and organises storage — the block and file protocols that carry VM disk data, the VMFS and NFS datastore types that hold virtual machine files, raw device mappings for direct SAN access, and Storage Policy-Based Management that abstracts storage capabilities from the VM.

How VMware vSAN pools local NVMe, SSD, and HDD storage across ESXi hosts into a shared distributed datastore — covering the Original Storage Architecture versus the Express Storage Architecture introduced in vSAN 8, fault domains, storage policies, and stretched cluster design.

How vSphere HA monitors ESXi hosts and automatically restarts virtual machines on surviving hosts when a failure is detected — covering heartbeat mechanisms, admission control policies that reserve failover capacity, VM restart priority, and VMCP for datastore-level failure handling.

How vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler continuously monitors CPU and memory utilisation across a cluster and automatically migrates virtual machines via vMotion to balance load — and how DRS rules, automation levels, and DPM extend its behaviour for advanced workload placement and power efficiency.

How vSphere migrates running virtual machines between hosts with vMotion and between datastores with Storage vMotion — the network and hardware requirements that must be met, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility that bridges CPU generation gaps, and cross-vCenter migration for moving VMs between vCenter instances.

How vSphere Fault Tolerance creates a continuously synchronised shadow VM on a separate host — providing zero RPO and near-zero RTO by instantly taking over if the primary host fails — and the strict requirements and limitations that govern which workloads FT can protect.

How vSphere controls access to virtualisation infrastructure — through a role-based permission model that grants privileges on inventory objects, lockdown modes that restrict direct ESXi host access, and certificate management via the VMware Certificate Authority that secures internal component communication.

How vSphere protects virtual machine data at rest and in motion through VM Encryption tied to an external Key Management Server, virtual Trusted Platform Module for guest OS security features, and vSphere Trust Authority for attestation-based host trust without requiring all hosts to connect directly to KMS.

How vSphere virtual machines are constructed — the hardware version that determines available virtual devices, the machine types and BIOS/UEFI options, the virtual disk formats and their performance implications, the files that make up a VM on disk, and how snapshots work as a chain of delta disks.

How vSphere controls how CPU and memory are allocated among virtual machines — using resource pools to group VMs with shared entitlements, shares to set relative priority during contention, reservations to guarantee minimum resources, and limits to cap maximum consumption.

How vSphere Content Library provides a centralised repository for VM templates, OVF/OVA packages, ISO images, and scripts — and how subscribed libraries automatically synchronise content from a published library to remote sites, enabling consistent and controlled VM deployment across a datacenter.

How vSphere Lifecycle Manager manages the software lifecycle of ESXi hosts — offering both the legacy baseline-based approach for patching individual updates and the modern image-based approach that treats the entire host software stack as a single versioned image for consistent cluster-wide deployment.

How to protect a vCenter Server Appliance from failure — using the built-in file-based backup to export configuration and inventory data to an external server on a schedule, restoring from backup when needed, and deploying vCenter HA for active/passive redundancy without relying on external backup.

How vSphere surfaces health and performance data — predefined alarms that trigger on host and VM conditions with configurable notifications, performance charts that visualise historical CPU, memory, network, and disk metrics, and esxtop for real-time deep-dive diagnostics directly on the ESXi host.

How vSphere Replication asynchronously replicates virtual machine disks to a secondary site at configurable RPOs — and how Site Recovery Manager orchestrates the entire DR process from automated failover and recovery plan execution to non-disruptive testing and failback.

How VMware Cloud Foundation bundles ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX into a single integrated SDDC platform deployed and managed by SDDC Manager — and how the Aria suite of management tools extends VCF with capacity planning, log analytics, network visibility, and cloud automation.