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.

I am excited to share that I have officially earned the VMware Certified Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Support certification! This is a significant milestone for me, as it validates the deep, hands-on skills required to support and troubleshoot one of the most comprehensive hybrid cloud platforms in the industry.

In the era of Broadcom, the focus on VMware Cloud Foundation as the primary private cloud solution has become more pronounced than ever. Achieving this certification feels particularly relevant and timely, and I wanted to share some insights into what this certification entails and why I believe it is so valuable.

The VCP-VCF Support certification is designed for technical professionals who have extensive experience with the VMware Cloud Foundation solution. It goes far beyond basic administration and focuses squarely on the ability to diagnose and resolve complex issues across the entire VCF stack.

As the official certification description states, a certified individual is knowledgeable of the full suite of products that comprise VCF, including:

• SDDC Manager
• vSphere Enterprise Plus (with vCenter, ESXi, and Tanzu)
• NSX
• vSAN
• Aria Suite Enterprise (Lifecycle, Automation, Operations, and Logs)
• Aria Operations for Networks
• HCX
• Data Services Manager (DSM)

This certification demonstrates that an individual possesses the skills to effectively support and troubleshoot the deployment, operation, and management of this integrated solution.

A Deep Dive into the Exam (2V0-15.25)

The certification exam, VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Support (2V0-15.25), is a rigorous test of practical knowledge. What makes this exam unique is its laser focus on real-world problem-solving. According to the official exam guide, the testable objectives are drawn exclusively from "Section 5 - Troubleshoot and Optimize the VMware by Broadcom Solution." This means that every single question is designed to test a candidate's ability to troubleshoot a specific scenario.

The scope of troubleshooting knowledge required is incredibly broad and covers the entire lifecycle of a VCF environment. Key areas include:

This intense focus on troubleshooting makes the VCP-VCF Support certification a true testament to an individual's hands-on expertise and problem-solving capabilities in complex VCF environments.

For me, pursuing this certification was about more than just passing an exam. It was about validating the skills I use every day to help organizations successfully run and maintain their private cloud infrastructure. As VMware Cloud Foundation continues to be the strategic platform for on-premises and hybrid cloud, having a deep understanding of how to keep it running smoothly is more critical than ever.

This certification provides a formal recognition of that expertise and gives me even more confidence in my ability to tackle the most challenging VCF issues. I am proud to be a VCP-VCF Support certified professional and look forward to continuing to help the community navigate the exciting world of VMware Cloud Foundation.

I am absolutely thrilled to share some fantastic news with you all! My session, "VMware Cloud Foundation Troubleshooting: Real-World Scenarios and Solutions", has been selected for the inaugural VMUG Connect Amsterdam, taking place from March 17-19, 2026, at the RAI Amsterdam.

It is an incredible honor to be chosen as a speaker for this new, flagship event. For years, the VMUG community has been a cornerstone of my professional journey, and having the opportunity to give back by sharing my experiences with VMware Cloud Foundation is something I am genuinely excited about.

Mark your calendars! My breakout session is scheduled for the final day of the event:

• Title: VMware Cloud Foundation Troubleshooting: Real-World Scenarios and Solutions
• Track: Solutions in Action
• Date: Thursday, March 19, 2026 - Amsterdam
• Time: 10:45 AM – 11:30 AM

• Time Slot: April 8, 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM - Minneapolis

As the official description states, this session is designed to go beyond theory and dive straight into the practical, real-world challenges we face in production environments. We will walk through common problems encountered with new deployments, upgrades, license management, and workload domains. My goal is to equip you with actionable, step-by-step solutions for troubleshooting VCF compute, storage, and networking components.

This session is based on my extensive experience in the field and the comprehensive VMware Cloud Foundation Troubleshooting course material. I plan to cover a wide range of topics to provide you with valuable, hands-on insights. You can expect to learn how to:

• Apply a structured troubleshooting methodology to resolve common VCF validation and precheck errors.
• Identify and use the correct log files to troubleshoot the VCF Installer and licensing components.
• Effectively troubleshoot network pool creation and ESX host commissioning.
• Monitor vSAN and network health using the VCF Operations console.
• Generate and review VCF support bundles to diagnose complex issues.

Whether you are a seasoned VCF administrator or just getting started, this session will provide you with practical techniques to enhance your troubleshooting skills and build confidence in managing your VCF environment.

For those who haven't heard, VMUG Connect is the exciting new multi-day format that replaces the traditional UserCons. It promises a more immersive experience with deeper technical content, more hands-on labs, and invaluable networking opportunities. Taking place over three days at the RAI Amsterdam, this is set to be the premier VMware community event in Europe for 2026.

It’s the perfect opportunity to connect with peers, meet industry experts, and get hands-on with the latest VMware innovations. I am incredibly excited about this new format and the chance to meet so many of you in person.

I truly hope to see you in Amsterdam in March. Please make sure to register for VMUG Connect and add my session to your schedule. I look forward to sharing my knowledge, learning from your experiences, and connecting with the amazing Dutch and international VMware community.

See you at the RAI!

In today's data-driven world, ensuring reliable and resilient access to applications and their data is no longer a luxury—it's a fundamental requirement for nearly all IT organizations. Virtualization has transformed the data center, and with it, storage has evolved. VMware vSAN stands at the forefront of this evolution, shifting the paradigm from traditional, siloed storage arrays to a powerful, software-defined storage solution integrated directly into the hypervisor.

This article explores the core availability technologies within VMware vSAN, with a special focus on the advancements introduced in the Express Storage Architecture (ESA). We will break down how vSAN ensures data remains available and resilient across a wide range of failure scenarios, from a single drive failure to an entire host outage. The insights shared here are based on VMware's official whitepaper, "vSAN Availability Technologies: Resilience Capabilities for vSAN in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0", published in December 2025.

VMware vSAN is a distributed storage solution that aggregates local storage devices from a cluster of vSphere hosts to create a shared storage pool. This approach offers incredible scalability and flexibility. At a high level, vSAN comes in two flavors: the Original Storage Architecture (OSA) and the more advanced Express Storage Architecture (ESA), introduced in 2022.

According to the VMware whitepaper, ESA represents a significant leap forward in performance, efficiency, and resilience. Unlike OSA, which utilized disk groups with a mix of caching and capacity devices, ESA employs a single tier of high-performance NVMe devices. This streamlined design minimizes the impact of a hardware failure, dramatically reducing the time it takes to restore data to its prescribed level of resilience.

To illustrate the difference, consider the impact of a single storage device failure as documented in the whitepaper:

This table clearly shows that ESA's architecture provides a much smaller failure domain, leading to faster recovery and better overall performance during degraded states.

vSAN manages data in the form of objects, which are the primary units of storage that make up a virtual machine, such as its virtual disks (VMDKs) and configuration files. As described in the VMware documentation, these objects can be up to 62TB in size and are broken down into smaller components. The placement of these components across the hosts in the cluster is what determines the resilience of the VM's data.

This placement is not random; it is dictated by Storage Policies. These policies are the cornerstone of vSAN's availability model, allowing administrators to define the desired level of resilience for each VM on a granular basis.

The most critical setting in a storage policy is Failures to Tolerate (FTT). This setting defines how many host, site, or fault domain failures an object can withstand before becoming unavailable. For example:

•FTT=1: The VM's data can tolerate the failure of one host.

•FTT=2: The VM's data can tolerate the simultaneous failure of two hosts.

The whitepaper emphasizes an important distinction: the FTT setting applies only to failures for the hosts that the object resides on, not the total number of failures within a cluster. This object-based approach is what allows vSAN to decouple availability considerations from cluster size, making it less susceptible to the impacts of discrete failures as the cluster size increases.

Once the FTT level is set, the policy defines how that resilience is achieved through a data placement scheme. vSAN primarily uses two methods:

1.RAID-1 (Mirroring): This method creates one or more full, synchronous copies (mirrors) of the object's components on different hosts. It offers the best performance but comes at a higher capacity cost (e.g., FTT=1 requires 2x the capacity).

2.RAID-5/6 (Erasure Coding): This is a more space-efficient method that stripes data and parity information across multiple hosts. RAID-5 can tolerate one failure, while RAID-6 can tolerate two. Historically, erasure coding incurred a performance penalty, but the VMware whitepaper highlights that with the vSAN Express Storage Architecture, RAID-5/6 can be used with performance comparable to RAID-1, making it the preferred choice for most workloads.

Thanks to ESA, RAID-1 mirroring should now primarily be reserved for site-level resilience in Stretched Clusters, as noted in the documentation.

The chosen resilience policy has implications for the cluster size. More advanced protection schemes require more hosts to distribute the data and parity components. The whitepaper provides clear guidance on minimum and recommended host counts:

The recommended configuration includes an additional host beyond the minimum, allowing vSAN to automatically repair data and reestablish the prescribed level of resilience in the event of a sustained host failure.

vSAN 8 and later simplify this process with Auto-Policy Management. As described in the whitepaper, this feature allows vSAN to automatically determine the most appropriate and efficient storage policy based on the characteristics of the cluster, ensuring optimal resilience without manual intervention.

One of the most impressive features highlighted in the VMware documentation is the Adaptive RAID-5 Erasure Coding capability in ESA. This feature dynamically adjusts the data structure based on the number of hosts in the cluster. For clusters with fewer than six hosts using FTT=1 with RAID-5, vSAN will stripe the data with parity across three hosts. For clusters with six or more hosts, the same policy rule will stripe the data with parity across five hosts, providing even better distribution and efficiency.

This adaptive approach ensures that vSAN automatically optimizes for the best balance of capacity efficiency and performance as your infrastructure grows.

VMware vSAN provides a robust and highly configurable set of availability technologies designed for the modern, dynamic data center. By abstracting resilience into simple storage policies, it empowers administrators to easily protect their virtual machines against a wide range of hardware failures.

The introduction of the Express Storage Architecture (ESA) marks a pivotal moment for hyper-converged infrastructure. By leveraging a single-tier NVMe architecture and making space-efficient RAID-5/6 erasure coding as performant as traditional mirroring, ESA delivers unprecedented levels of resilience, efficiency, and performance. As organizations continue to scale their virtual environments, vSAN's object-based, policy-driven approach ensures that data availability and protection can scale right along with them.

This article is based on VMware's official whitepaper: "vSAN Availability Technologies: Resilience Capabilities for vSAN in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0" (December 12, 2025).

📄 Download the full whitepaper: https://www.vmware.com/docs/vmw-vSAN-Availability-Technologies