VCP-DCV flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Type 1 hypervisor

ESXi runs directly on server hardware without a host operating system, and its VMkernel schedules CPU, memory, storage, and network resources for virtual machines.

vCenter Server Appliance

A prebuilt Photon OS virtual machine that provides centralized management for ESXi hosts; it is required for DRS, vSphere HA, vMotion orchestration, and distributed switches.

vSphere HA

A cluster feature that restarts virtual machines on surviving hosts after a host failure, using admission control reservations to guarantee failover capacity.

vSphere DRS

Distributes virtual machine compute load across cluster hosts by generating vMotion recommendations or automatic migrations, based on resource shares, reservations, and utilization thresholds.

vSphere Distributed Switch

A distributed switch configured once at vCenter and applied to many hosts, providing consistent port groups, private VLANs, and network I/O control.

vCenter Server Foundation

A limited vCenter edition that can manage a maximum of four ESXi hosts, intended for small environments without advanced multi-host scaling.

vSphere Enterprise Plus

The top vSphere edition, adding Distributed Switch, DRS, Storage DRS, host profiles, and vSphere with Tanzu capabilities beyond the Standard edition.

VMware vSAN

Software-defined storage built into ESXi that pools local disks across cluster hosts into a shared datastore, licensed separately and governed by storage policies.

VMware Site Recovery Manager

An orchestration add-on that automates planned migrations and disaster recovery failover of vSphere workloads between sites, using vSphere Replication or array-based replication.

N+1 host redundancy

A design rule that provisions one spare host worth of capacity so the cluster can absorb a single host failure and still run all workloads.

vSAN minimum cluster size

A standard vSAN cluster requires at least three hosts; two-node configurations are supported only when a witness appliance is deployed at a third site.

VMFS6 datastore maximum

VMFS6 supports a maximum datastore or LUN size of 64 TB and a maximum virtual disk file size of 62 TB.

DNS requirement for vSphere

Every ESXi host and vCenter Server should have resolvable forward and reverse DNS records before installation; missing records cause certificate and single sign-on problems.

Jumbo frames end to end

An MTU of 9000 must be configured consistently on physical switch ports, virtual switches, and VMkernel adapters, or large packets are silently dropped.

vCenter deployment stage 2

The second phase of the vCenter Server Appliance installer, which configures single sign-on, networking, and sizing and then starts the appliance after stage 1 deploys the OVF.

ESXi boot device minimum

ESXi 7.0 and later require a boot medium of at least 32 GB; SD cards and USB devices are deprecated in 7.0 and unsupported for boot in 8.0.

SSO default domain

When vCenter is deployed, the single sign-on domain defaults to vsphere.local, and the initial administrator account is [email protected].

Lockdown mode

Restricts direct ESXi access so that only vCenter can manage the host; exception users can still log in directly when needed.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager

A vCenter service that remediates hosts using either baselines of patches or a desired-state cluster image, but not both within the same cluster.

CPU ready time

The percentage of time a virtual machine was ready to run but could not be scheduled on a physical CPU; sustained values above roughly ten percent indicate contention.

Memory ballooning

A memory reclamation technique where ESXi inflates a balloon driver inside the guest to force it to release unused pages before the host resorts to swapping.

Storage I/O Control

A datastore-level feature that prioritizes and throttles I/O by shares when the datastore's measured latency exceeds a configured congestion threshold.

VMXNET3 adapter

A paravirtualized network adapter that offers higher throughput and lower CPU cost than e1000 and is the recommended choice for most virtual machines.

Purple diagnostic screen

The ESXi crash screen shown after a VMkernel panic; the core dump and support bundle record the failing module and stack trace.

APD versus PDL

All Paths Down means a datastore is temporarily unreachable and ESXi retries; Permanent Device Loss means the LUN is gone and HA can restart affected VMs.

vm-support bundle

A command-line utility on ESXi that collects logs and configuration into a compressed archive for analysis; it can be run on a host or through vCenter.

vpxd service

The vCenter Server service that handles the management API and inventory; its logs are stored under /var/log/vmware/vpxd on the appliance.

Time skew and Kerberos

Active Directory authentication fails when the vCenter clock differs from a domain controller by more than five minutes; verify NTP on the appliance.

vCenter permissions inheritance

Permissions assigned to an inventory object propagate to child objects unless overridden; a child assignment replaces rather than merges with the inherited one.

vCenter file-based backup

A scheduled backup of the vCenter Server Appliance configuration and inventory taken through the VAMI interface on port 5480, excluding guest virtual machine data.

Host profiles

A vCenter feature that captures a reference host's configuration and checks or remediates other hosts against it for configuration compliance.

Maintenance mode with DRS

Placing a host into maintenance mode lets DRS evacuate its virtual machines with vMotion; the host then accepts no new virtual machine placements.