1. VM: Virtual Machine. Okay, thats easy enough!

2. ESXi: The vSphere Hypervisor from VMware. For extra trivia points, know that Elastic
Sky was the original proposed name of the hypervisor and is now the name of a band made
up of VMware employees.
3. vmkernel: Officially the operating system that runs ESXi and delivers storage
networking for VMs. More info.
4. VMFS: Virtual Machine File System for ESXi hosts, a clustered file system for running
VMs.
5. iSCSI: Ethernet-based shared storage protocol.
6. SAS: Drive type for local disks (also SATA).
7. FCoE: Fibre Channel over Ethernet, a networking and storage technology.
8. HBA: Host Bus Adapter for Fibre Channel storage networks.
9. IOPs: Input/Outputs per second, detailed measurement of a drive's performance.
10. VM Snapshot: A point-in-time representation of a VM.
11. ALUA: Asymmetrical logical unit access, a storage array feature. Duncan Epping
explains it well.
12. NUMA: Non-uniform memory access, when multiple processors are involved their
memory access is relative to their location.
13. Virtual NUMA: Virtualizes NUMA with VMware hardware version 8 VMs.
14. LUN: Logical unit number, identifies shared storage (Fibre Channel/iSCSI).
15. pRDM: Physical mode raw device mapping, presents a LUN directly to a VM.
16. vRDM: Virtual mode raw device mapping, encapsulates a path to a LUN specifically for
one VM in a VMDK.
17. SAN: Storage area network, a shared storage technique for block protocols (Fibre
Channel/iSCSI).
18. NAS: Network attached storage, a shared storage technique for file protocols (NFS).
19. NFS: Network file system, a file-based storage protocol.
20. DAS: Direct attached storage, disk devices in a host directly.

21. VAAI: vStorage APIs for Array Integration, the ability to offload I/O commands to the
disk array.
22. SSD: Solid state disk, a non-rotational drive that is faster than rotating drives.
23. VSAN: Virtual SAN, a new VMware announcement for making DAS deliver SAN
features in a virtualized manner.
24. vSwitch: A virtual switch, places VMs on a physical network.
25. vDS: vNetwork Distributed Switch, an enhanced version of the virtual switch.
26. ISO: Image file, taken from ISO 9660file system for optical drives.
27. vSphere Client: Administrative interface of vCenter Server.
28. vSphere Web Client: Web-based administrative interface of vCenter Server.
29. Host Profiles: Feature to deploy a pre-determined configuration to an ESXi host.
30. Auto Deploy: Technique to automatically install ESXi to a host.
31. VUM: vSphere Update Manager, a way to update hosts and VMs with latest patches,
VMware Tools and product updates.
32. vCLI: vSphere Command Line Interface, allows tasks to be run against hosts and vCenter
Server.
33. vSphere HA: High Availability, will restart a VM on another host if it fails.
34. vCenter Server Heartbeat: Will keep the vCenter Server available in the event a host
fails which is running vCenter.
35. Virtual Appliance: A pre-packed VM with an application on it.
36. vCenter Server: Server application that runs vSphere.
37. vCSA: Virtual appliance edition of vCenter Server.
38. vCloud Director: Application to pool vCenter environments and enable self-deployment
of VMs.
39. vCloud Automation Center: IT service delivery through policy and portals, get familiar
with vCAC.
40. VADP: vSphere APIs for Data Protection, a way to leverage the infrastructure for
backups.
41. MOB: Managed Object Reference, a technique vCenter uses to classify every item.

42. DNS: Domain Name Service, a name resolution protocol. Not related to VMware, but it
is imperative you set DNS up correctly to virtualize with vSphere.
43. vSphere: Collection of VMs, ESXi hosts, and vCenter Server.
44. SSH to ESXi host: The administrative interface you want to use for troubleshooting if
you cant use the vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client.
45. vCenter Linked Mode: A way of pooling vCenter Servers, typically across geographies.
46. vMotion: A VM migration technique.
47. Storage vMotion: A VM storage migration technique from one datastore to another.
48. vSphere DRS: Distributed Resource Scheduler, service that manages performance of
VMs.
49. vSphere SDRS: Storage DRS, manages free space and datastore latency for VMs in
pools.
50. Storage DRS Cluster: A collection SDRS objects (volumes, VMs, configuration).