IICTI Certified Virtualization Engineer

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate hypervisor internals and hardware-assisted virtualisation, compute performance engineering: NUMA, CPU and memory tuning, cluster design, resource scheduling and high availability and software-defined storage and storage I/O architecture, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Virtualization Engineer.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in cloud roles.

1. 01Hypervisor internals and hardware-assisted virtualisation9% of the exam

   • Evaluate hypervisor architectures and hardware virtualisation features to select and justify a platform for a given workload.
   • Scope: Type 1 vs type 2 architectures, Intel VT-x/AMD-V, EPT/NPT, VT-d/IOMMU, KVM/QEMU, ESXi VMkernel, Hyper-V partitions, nested virtualisation, paravirtualised drivers (virtio, VMXNET3).
2. 02Compute performance engineering: NUMA, CPU and memory tuning10% of the exam

   • Diagnose and resolve compute contention and latency issues using hypervisor performance counters.
   • Scope: NUMA topology and vNUMA, CPU pinning and isolation, overcommit ratios, co-stop and CPU ready, memory ballooning, TPS, huge pages, latency-sensitive and real-time VM tuning.
3. 03Cluster design, resource scheduling and high availability12% of the exam

   • Design resilient virtualisation clusters with scheduling and HA policies that meet defined availability targets.
   • Scope: DRS and affinity rules, admission control, vSphere HA and FT, Hyper-V failover clustering, Proxmox HA, live migration mechanics (vMotion, pre-copy/post-copy), fault domains.
4. 04Software-defined storage and storage I/O architecture14% of the exam

   • Architect storage for virtualised workloads and evaluate trade-offs between performance, capacity and resilience.
   • Scope: vSAN and Ceph RBD architectures, storage policies, iSCSI/NVMe-oF/FC multipathing, thin provisioning, snapshots and their performance impact, storage I/O control, queue depth tuning.
5. 05Software-defined networking and micro-segmentation14% of the exam

   • Design virtual network topologies that deliver isolation, performance and policy-driven segmentation.
   • Scope: Distributed switches, Open vSwitch, NSX and overlay networks (VXLAN, Geneve), SR-IOV and DPDK, distributed firewalling, micro-segmentation design, network I/O control.
6. 06Virtualisation security hardening and isolation assurance10% of the exam

   • Evaluate and harden a virtualisation platform against tenant isolation and management plane threats.
   • Scope: CIS benchmarks and vendor hardening guides, side-channel mitigations (Spectre/L1TF), secure boot and vTPM, AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX confidential VMs, management plane protection, privileged access.
7. 07Infrastructure as code and automated lifecycle management8% of the exam

   • Design automated, version-controlled provisioning and lifecycle processes for virtual infrastructure.
   • Scope: Terraform, Ansible, PowerCLI, Packer image pipelines, cloud-init, API-driven provisioning, configuration drift detection, patching and host lifecycle automation.
8. 08Data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity9% of the exam

   • Architect backup and disaster recovery solutions that meet defined RPO/RTO and ransomware resilience objectives.
   • Scope: Changed block tracking and image-level backup, immutable and air-gapped backups, ransomware recovery, replication (vSphere Replication, Zerto), SRM runbooks, RPO/RTO engineering, ISO 22301 alignment.
9. 09Platform migration and hybrid cloud strategy4% of the exam

   • Evaluate platform alternatives and lead a low-risk migration strategy with justified cost and risk trade-offs.
   • Scope: VMware licensing changes and exit planning, migration to Proxmox, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV or OpenShift Virtualization, V2V tooling, hybrid and sovereign cloud models, TCO analysis.
10. 10VMs and containers convergence: KubeVirt and hybrid workloads4% of the exam

    • Design architectures where virtual machines and containers coexist and evaluate workload placement choices.
    • Scope: KubeVirt and OpenShift Virtualization, VM and container co-scheduling, CSI/CNI integration, workload placement decisions, operational model differences.
11. 11Observability, capacity planning and advanced troubleshooting6% of the exam

    • Diagnose complex platform incidents and produce capacity plans grounded in telemetry and trend analysis.
    • Scope: esxtop and perfmon analysis, Prometheus and vendor monitoring stacks, log correlation, capacity forecasting and right-sizing, root cause analysis of PSOD/BSOD and host failures.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner