VMware glossary
Key VMware certification terms and acronyms.
Definitions are AI-assisted and reviewed for general accuracy — verify critical details against VMware's official documentation.
DPMDistributed Power Management
vSphere feature that consolidates workloads onto fewer hosts during low utilization and powers off idle hosts to save energy.
DRSDistributed Resource Scheduler
vSphere cluster feature that balances VM workloads across ESXi hosts using vMotion based on resource utilization.
ESXiElastic Sky X Integrated
VMware's Type-1 bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on server hardware and hosts virtual machines.
FTFault Tolerance
vSphere feature that maintains a live secondary VM in lockstep with a primary VM to provide zero-downtime failover.
HAHigh Availability
vSphere cluster feature that automatically restarts virtual machines on surviving hosts when an ESXi host fails.
iSCSIInternet Small Computer Systems Interface
A network protocol that encapsulates SCSI commands over TCP/IP, enabling block storage access from ESXi hosts to SAN arrays.
NFSNetwork File System
A network protocol used to mount file-based datastores on ESXi hosts from NAS storage arrays.
OVAOpen Virtual Appliance
A single-file archive of an OVF package that bundles descriptor, disk images, and manifest into one portable file.
OVFOpen Virtualization Format
An open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances consisting of one or more VMs.
RBACRole-Based Access Control
vCenter permission model where privileges are assigned to users or groups via predefined or custom roles on inventory objects.
RDMRaw Device Mapping
A vSphere disk type that maps a LUN directly to a VM, giving it direct access to a physical storage device.
SDRSStorage Distributed Resource Scheduler
vSphere feature that balances space and I/O load across datastores in a datastore cluster using Storage vMotion.
Snapshot
A point-in-time capture of a VM's disk, memory, and settings state, enabling rollback to that state if needed.
Storage vMotion
VMware feature that migrates a virtual machine's disk files between datastores while the VM remains running.
vCenter Server
VMware's centralized management platform for ESXi hosts, virtual machines, and associated infrastructure in a vSphere environment.
vCPUVirtual CPU
A logical processor allocated to a virtual machine, mapped by the hypervisor to physical CPU cores.
vDSvSphere Distributed Switch
A centrally managed virtual network switch in vCenter that spans multiple ESXi hosts and provides consistent network policy.
VLCMvSphere Lifecycle Manager
vCenter component that manages patching, upgrades, and firmware for ESXi hosts using baselines or desired-state images.
VMDKVirtual Machine Disk
File format used by VMware to represent a virtual machine's hard disk, stored on a datastore.
VMFSVirtual Machine File System
VMware's clustered file system optimized for storing virtual machine disk files on shared block storage.
VMkernel
The core operating system of ESXi that manages hardware resources and provides services for virtual machines.
vMotion
VMware technology that live-migrates a running virtual machine from one ESXi host to another with no downtime.
VSANvSAN
VMware's hyper-converged storage solution that pools local disks from ESXi hosts to create a shared datastore.
vSphere
VMware's server virtualization platform comprising ESXi hypervisor and vCenter Server for managing virtualized data center infrastructure.
VSSvSphere Standard Switch
A per-host virtual switch configured individually on each ESXi host to provide network connectivity for VMs and VMkernel ports.