Explain VMKernel and its importance.
VMware's VMkernel is a high-performance operating system that runs directly on the ESXi host. VMkernel generally acts as an interface between VMs and the physical hardware of the system and is referred to as microkernel by VMware since it runs on bare metal, directly on VMware ESX hosts. In addition to providing hardware abstraction and operating system (OS) services, VMKernel allocates memory and schedules CPUs. In addition, it handles services such as vMotion, Fault Tolerance, NFS, and iSCSI. In order for VMs to communicate with ESXi, the VMKernel is vital.
