Eric Sloof

On October 10th, 2025, I successfully passed the VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator (2V0-17.25) exam.

This new certification is part of the VMware by Broadcom version 9 portfolio and validates the skills required to manage and operate VMware Cloud Foundation environments.

The VCP-VCF Administrator credential demonstrates comprehensive knowledge of deploying, managing, and supporting private cloud environments built on VMware Cloud Foundation 9. It goes far beyond vSphere and vSAN administration – covering VCF Operations, Automation, Identity Broker, and Fleet Management – all essential for real-world cloud infrastructure operations.

The exam was certainly not easy. Some scenario-based questions required careful reading and time management, especially those related to Container Services where I still have limited hands-on experience. Compared to version 5.2, VCF 9 has evolved significantly — both in architecture and terminology. It’s a completely different product in terms of scalability and component structure.

I’m pleased with my final score of 400 points, which made all the preparation worthwhile! But it’s done — and this certification is now valid for three years, which seems to be the new standard for version 9 exams.

As an extra benefit, passing this exam also grants access to a one-year VMware Personal Use License through the Broadcom certification portal. Holders with a VMUG Advantage membership can even extend that license for up to three years, including full VCF product access for lab use — a great way to keep skills sharp.

I’ve also written an earlier article on the VMware by Broadcom launch of five new version 9 certification exams, which you can find here:

👉 VMware by Broadcom Launches Five New Version 9 Certification Exams

I’m proud to have received the Credly badge, which is now featured on my LinkedIn profile.

Another step forward in mastering the ever-evolving VMware Cloud Foundation ecosystem!

VMware’s latest technical paper, vSAN Availability Technologies, provides an in-depth look at how vSAN ensures data availability and resilience within modern software-defined data centers.

The publication focuses primarily on the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) — the foundation for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 — and how it redefines storage reliability at scale.

The original Original Storage Architecture (OSA) relied on disk groups with separate cache and capacity devices. While effective for its time, this approach introduced larger “blast zones” during device failures.

In contrast, the Express Storage Architecture (ESA) uses a single-tier model, dramatically reducing failure boundaries and resynchronization times. The result is a leaner, faster, and far more resilient vSAN layer that can instantly recover compliance after transient or sustained outages.

vSAN’s data availability is governed by storage policies that define the number of failures an object can tolerate (FTT).

With ESA, these policies become even smarter. Administrators can use Auto-Policy Management, allowing vSAN to automatically select the optimal resilience level and data placement scheme based on the cluster configuration — for example, RAID-5 for smaller clusters or RAID-6 for environments with six or more hosts.

Each host in a vSAN cluster acts as its own fault domain, ensuring that data remains accessible even when individual hosts fail.

For more complex designs, administrators can define custom fault domains to represent racks or rooms, achieving rack-level resilience.

vSAN 9.0 within VCF also extends these capabilities with site maintenance mode and manual site takeover, improving the operational control of stretched and two-node clusters.

New concepts such as durability components ensure that even during maintenance or failure events, vSAN preserves the most recent writes.

The ESA also introduces low-level metadata mirroring, proactive hardware analytics, and NVMe endurance tracking, further strengthening resilience without requiring administrator intervention.

While vSAN provides continuous data availability and durability, data protection — recovery to a specific point in time — is achieved through features like vSAN Data Protection.

This native capability leverages the ESA’s snapshot engine for efficient local restores and integrates with vSAN-to-vSAN replication for remote protection. Together, they form a cornerstone for robust disaster recovery strategies within VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.

The ESA represents a major step forward in vSAN’s evolution — simplifying design, reducing operational risk, and providing unmatched data availability for modern private and hybrid clouds.

For architects, administrators, and engineers designing resilient VCF infrastructures, the full whitepaper is a must-read:

👉 Download the complete “vSAN Availability Technologies” document