Eric Sloof

Exciting news for networking professionals in the VMware ecosystem! VMware has just released the new VMware Certified Advanced Professional – VCAP Administrator Networking (3V0-25.25) certification. This advanced-level exam is your opportunity to validate your expertise in designing, deploying, and managing cutting-edge VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Networking environments.

A New Benchmark for VCF Networking Expertise

The brand-new 3V0-25.25 exam is designed for seasoned IT professionals who want to prove their skills in the ever-evolving landscape of enterprise and multi-cloud infrastructures. This certification is a testament to a candidate's ability to handle the complex networking challenges within a VCF environment.

Here are the essential details for this new certification exam:

Are You Ready for the Challenge?

This certification is geared towards experienced professionals with a solid foundation in enterprise networking and VMware NSX. Ideal candidates will have at least one to two years of hands-on experience designing and administering NSX solutions, coupled with a minimum of two years in enterprise networking. If you're comfortable with the UI, CLI, and API-based workflows of VCF and have practical experience with both VCF Networking and vSphere, this exam is for you.

What’s Inside the New Exam?

The 3V0-25.25 exam focuses heavily on the planning and design aspects of VCF Networking. It's structured to test your real-world architectural skills.

Key areas you'll be tested on include:

• IT Architectures, Technologies, and Standards: This section will challenge your understanding of core architectural principles, from differentiating between business and technical requirements to managing risks and constraints in a design.
• Plan and Design the VMware Solution: This is the heart of the exam. It evaluates your ability to build a complete VCF solution from the ground up, considering all critical design aspects like availability, manageability, performance, security, and recoverability.

While the exam guide indicates that some sections do not currently have testable objectives, a comprehensive understanding of the entire VCF Networking lifecycle, from installation to troubleshooting, will be invaluable for your success.

Get Prepared for the New Exam

To help you get ready for this new certification, VMware recommends a combination of practical experience and targeted training. The following courses are now available to align with the new exam objectives:

• VMware Cloud Foundation Networking Advanced Design
• VMware Cloud Foundation Networking Advanced Configuration
• VMware Cloud Foundation Networking Advanced Troubleshooting

Studying the official VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 documentation and other technical resources from Broadcom is also essential. Be sure to review the latest release notes and materials to stay current with all VCF features and functions.

Be Among the First to Get Certified!

The release of the VMware Certified Advanced Professional - VCF Networking exam marks a significant milestone for networking professionals. By earning this certification, you'll be recognized for your advanced skills and be at the forefront of the industry. Don't miss this opportunity to showcase your expertise and advance your career.

References

[1] VMware Learning. (2025). Advanced VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Networking Exam Guide.

In today's data-driven world, managing storage costs while ensuring performance and resilience is a critical challenge for any enterprise. VMware's vSAN, a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure, offers a powerful suite of space efficiency technologies designed to maximize storage utilization and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO). This article explores the key features of vSAN's space-saving capabilities, drawing insights from the comprehensive whitepaper, "vSAN Space Efficiency Technologies".

The Two Pillars of vSAN Space Efficiency

vSAN's approach to storage saving can be broken down into two main categories:

Opportunistic: These techniques, such as deduplication and compression, work by reducing data on-disk based on the nature of the data itself. The savings are variable and depend heavily on the data patterns and workloads.

Deterministic: These methods, primarily RAID-5/6 erasure coding, provide a guaranteed level of capacity savings by storing data and parity information in a highly efficient manner.

Let's delve into how these technologies function, particularly highlighting the architectural differences between the vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) and the newer, more advanced Express Storage Architecture (ESA).

Opportunistic Savings: Deduplication and Compression

Data deduplication and compression are powerful tools for reducing the storage footprint of your virtual machines. However, their implementation and effectiveness differ significantly between vSAN's two architectures.

The Express Storage Architecture (ESA) Advantage

The vSAN Express Storage Architecture, introduced in vSAN 8, represents a fundamental shift in how space efficiency is handled. Key improvements include:

With ESA, compression is enabled by default and is so efficient that it's recommended to leave it on for almost all workloads. The introduction of global deduplication in VCF 9.0 further enhances ESA's capabilities, making it a superior choice for both performance and space savings.

Other Opportunistic Features

Beyond deduplication and compression, vSAN also utilizes:

Thin Provisioning: Storage is allocated to VMs on-demand as data is written, preventing the over-allocation of resources.

TRIM/UNMAP Space Reclamation: This feature allows vSAN to reclaim storage space that has been freed up within the guest operating system, ensuring that deleted files don't continue to consume physical capacity.

Deterministic Savings: RAID-5/6 Erasure Coding

For guaranteed space savings, vSAN offers RAID-5 and RAID-6 erasure coding. Instead of creating a full mirror of the data for protection (RAID-1), erasure coding stripes data and parity blocks across multiple hosts. This provides resilience against drive or host failures while using significantly less capacity.

RAID-5 can tolerate a single failure (FTT=1) and consumes only 1.33x the space of the original data.

RAID-6 can tolerate two failures (FTT=2) and consumes just 1.5x the space.

This is a substantial improvement over RAID-1 mirroring, which would require 2x and 3x the capacity for the same levels of protection, respectively. While erasure coding in the OSA had performance considerations, the ESA has made significant strides, making RAID-5/6 a viable and efficient option for a wider range of workloads.

Conclusion: Smarter Storage for the Modern Data Center

VMware vSAN provides a robust and flexible toolkit for optimizing storage capacity. By combining opportunistic techniques like advanced compression and global deduplication in the Express Storage Architecture with the deterministic savings of erasure coding, organizations can achieve significant reductions in their storage footprint. This not only lowers capital expenditure on hardware but also reduces operational costs related to power, cooling, and data center space.

As the data shows, the move to the vSAN Express Storage Architecture is highly recommended for any organization looking to maximize both performance and efficiency in their hyper-converged environment.

Based on the document: VMware, "vSAN Space Efficiency Technologies," December 12, 2025. The full document can be accessed for a more detailed technical overview.