Tag: ESXi
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How to break into a VMware career: certs, interviews and your first job (VMware for Beginners, Part 18)
A practical, no-fluff guide for freshers on breaking into a VMware career in 2026: which certification to start with, the interview questions that trip people up, and what actually gets you hired.
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Build a free VMware home lab: ESXi, vCenter and nested labs (VMware for Beginners, Part 17)
The tools are free again. Here is how a fresher builds a real VMware home lab on one laptop, what hardware actually matters, and a first lab you can finish this weekend.
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vSphere HA: what happens when an ESXi host dies (VMware for Beginners, Part 10)
vSphere HA restarts your VMs on another host when an ESXi host fails. A plain-English guide to how HA detects a dead host, what admission control does, and why it is not zero downtime.
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vMotion: moving a running VM with zero downtime (VMware for Beginners, Part 9)
vMotion moves a powered-on VM between ESXi hosts with no downtime a user can feel. Here is how the live memory copy works, what it needs, and how to explain it in an interview.
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Virtual networking basics: vSwitch, port groups and VLANs (VMware for Beginners, Part 7)
A plain-English guide to VMware virtual networking for freshers: what a vSwitch, port group, uplink and VLAN really are, how a packet travels from VM to physical switch, and the VLAN and port-group mistakes that break a VM network.
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Datastores and storage basics: where your VMs actually live (VMware for Beginners, Part 6)
A plain-English guide to VMware datastores: what VMFS, NFS and vSAN are, how a VM lives as files on disk, and why thin provisioning is the storage choice most likely to page a junior engineer.
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Anatomy of a virtual machine: vCPU, vRAM, disk and NIC (VMware for Beginners, Part 5)
A virtual machine is just four parts: a vCPU, vRAM, a virtual disk and a virtual NIC. Here is what each one really does, the sane default for each, and the beginner traps that catch new admins.
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ESXi, the hypervisor that runs your VMs (VMware for Beginners, Part 3)
A plain-English tour of VMware ESXi: what the hypervisor is, the VMkernel inside it, Type 1 versus Type 2, how you manage a host, and the boot-media trap that catches beginners.
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Physical server or virtual machine: what really changes (VMware for Beginners, Part 2)
A plain-English look at how a virtual machine differs from a physical server, why companies consolidate onto fewer hosts, and the oversubscription metric every fresher should learn first.
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VCF 9.x Pre-Installation Checklist: What to Verify Before You Start the VCF Installer
A pre-check list for a fresh VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x management domain deployment (9.0 and 9.1), with the command to run for each item plus MTU-per-traffic and password requirement tables.
Architect’s Toolkit
PJ’s Tools
VMware Cloud Foundation
- VCF Documentation
- VCF 9 Planning & Preparation Workbook
- VCF Bill of Materials (BoM)
- VMware Compatibility Guide
- VMware Interoperability Matrix
- VMware Configuration Maximums
- VMware Ports & Protocols
- VMware Hands-on Labs
- RVTools Download
Nutanix
AI & Cloud-Native Platform
- NVIDIA Build (Model Catalog)
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise Reference Architecture
- NVIDIA NIM Performance Benchmarking
- NVIDIA NGC Catalog
- NeMo Microservices Helm Chart
- Helm Charts Repository
- Hugging Face Models
Architecture & Design
About the Author
Dr Pranay Jha
Dr. Pranay Jha is a Cloud and AI Consultant with 18+ years of experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and enterprise infrastructure transformation. He specializes in VMware technologies, multi-cloud strategy, and Generative AI solutions. He holds a PhD in Computer Applications with research focused on Cloud and AI, has published multiple research papers, and has been a VMware vExpert since 2016 and a VMUG Community Leader.
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