Interview experience
VMware interview experiences covering Aptitude / online test, Technical Interview Round 1, Technical Interview Round 2, Managerial round, +1 more. Round-wise notes, common questions, and what candidates report clears each stage.
VMware Interview Questions and Answers (2026)
VMware, now part of Broadcom, is known for virtualization and cloud infrastructure software used by enterprises worldwide. Founded in 1998, it operates large India R&D centres in Bengaluru, Pune, and Chennai. VMware recruits campus engineers for cloud platforms, networking, and enterprise software development.
Explore: Interview experience · HR interview questions · Overview · Placement papers · Preparation guide
Overview
VMware (now part of Broadcom) runs a fairly deep technical loop for freshers - OS, Unix, networking, and C++ across two technical rounds plus a managerial round - reflecting that it builds virtualization software, not typical application code; hiring itself has also shifted onto Broadcom’s process since the 2023 acquisition.
HR interview questions
VMware HR interview questions with sample answer frameworks - motivation, relocation, STAR stories, and culture-fit prompts.
VMware interview process at a glance
| Round | Duration | What they test |
|---|---|---|
| Aptitude / online test | 60-90 min | Quant, logical reasoning, basic coding |
| Technical Interview Round 1 | 45-60 min | DSA, OS, networking, C++ |
| Technical Interview Round 2 | 45-60 min | Unix, DBMS, problem-solving, OS, project tech |
| Managerial round | 30-45 min | Project depth, team fit |
| HR interview | 30 min | Motivation, fit |
VMware online test: quick answers
These answers are compiled from public candidate reports and prep guides, not from an official VMware or Broadcom notice. Most detailed reports predate the 2023 Broadcom acquisition, so the instruction screen of your own test is the final word.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Which platform is it on? | HirePro. Campus reports for Intern + MTS hiring name hirepro.in, and the interviews that follow have used Zoom with HackerRank for live coding. |
| How many questions and how long? | About 90 minutes. A 2021 campus test had aptitude (15 min), technical MCQs (29 min), one coding problem (30 min) and a programming-language MCQ section (two 8-minute parts). Another campus report lists 10 aptitude questions, 30 technical questions and one coding problem. PrepInsta’s 2024 pattern page also gives 90 minutes and one 30-minute coding question, but its section-wise counts do not add up to its own total, so treat exact counts as approximate. |
| What are the sections? | Quantitative, logical and verbal aptitude; technical MCQs on networking, OOP, OS and DBMS; one coding problem (for example converting text to cipher text using a given key); and a language section where you pick two different languages from C, C++, Java and Python. |
| Does it have negative marking? | Reports conflict. PrepInsta’s 2024 VMware pattern page says yes, but the first-hand GeeksforGeeks campus reports do not mention it. Assume a wrong MCQ answer can cost you. |
| Is there a sectional cutoff? | Likely, though VMware and Broadcom publish no numbers. Each section has its own timer, and a candidate account on PrepInsta says coding had to be cleared separately from the MCQ sections. The section percentages PrepInsta shows are its own estimates, not official figures. |
| How much is the cutoff? | No test cutoff is published; shortlists are relative to the batch (one campus report: 45 of more than 350 students cleared the online round). Older campus reports cite eligibility of around 7.5+ CGPA or 75%; no current Broadcom-era criterion is published, so check the drive notice. |
| Is there coding? | Yes, one problem in about 30 minutes in the online test, then live coding in both technical interviews. |
| What happens after the test now? | An April 2025 Broadcom intern review on Glassdoor describes an online shortlisting test, then two technical rounds, a manager round and an HR round, all online, with questions mostly on DSA and projects. |
| Is there a case study? | In some drives. A 2021 campus drive gave a 3-hour take-home system design case study (class diagram and pseudocode), which was then discussed in the interviews. |
VMware interview questions by role
These themes come from GeeksforGeeks and PrepInsta candidate reports for VMware’s India campus hiring. They show the level and style, not a fixed list.
| Role | Reported questions and topics |
|---|---|
| Intern + MTS (systems and DSA focus) | Count the ways to reach step n taking one or two steps, with time complexity; binary tree traversals and which traversals can rebuild a tree; minimum insertions to make a string a palindrome; cross-questioning on a project’s security, design and networking. |
| MTS (Java-leaning candidates) | OOP concepts implemented in Java; garbage collection, multithreading, serialisation; final vs static vs abstract; common elements in two sorted linked lists; counting negative numbers in a sorted matrix; explaining your case-study design. |
| Campus MTS (OS and DBMS focus) | Process states, deadlock conditions, Banker’s algorithm, mutex vs semaphore, 1NF to 3NF, linear vs non-linear data structures, BFS and DFS, the middle of a linked list and tree depth code. |
| Broadcom-era intern (2025) | A linked-list coding problem and DSA plus project questions across two technical rounds (April 2025 Glassdoor review); an infix-to-postfix conversion as the online-test coding question (candidate account on PrepInsta). |
| Managerial round (all roles) | Scaling a project to millions of requests, choosing and justifying technologies, a critical bug found two weeks before launch, conflicting instructions from teammates, and VMware’s values. |
Asked across every role: your final-year project in depth, OS fundamentals, and whether you will relocate to Bengaluru or Pune.
Aptitude / online test
A standard screening test on quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning, and basic coding ability before the technical interviews begin. Recent campus reports describe HirePro with sectional timers: aptitude (~10–15 min), technical MCQs (~30 min on DSA/OS/networks/OOP/DBMS and C debug), one 30-minute coding problem, and sometimes a language output section where you pick two of C/C++/Java/Python.
Common questions
- Quantitative aptitude and logical reasoning MCQs
- Basic coding problems (arrays, strings, digit/counting variants)
- CS-fundamentals MCQs with occasional C program output debugging
- Prime-range or combinatorics-style coding with tight I/O specs
Technical Interview Round 1
DSA coding combined with OS and networking fundamentals, plus C++-specific questions - reflecting VMware’s systems-software focus.
Common questions
- DSA coding problems (arrays, linked lists, trees)
- OS fundamentals - process scheduling, memory management, virtual memory
- Networking basics - TCP/IP, OSI layers
- C++-specific questions - pointers, memory management, OOP features
Technical Interview Round 2
A second technical round leaning into Unix, DBMS, and general problem-solving, plus a close look at the technology choices behind your resume projects. Puzzles of varying difficulty are also common for fresher candidates.
Common questions
- Unix/Linux fundamentals - file permissions, process management, common commands
- DBMS basics and problem-solving puzzles
- Deep questions on the technologies used in your resume project
- Logic/estimation puzzles for freshers
Full round-by-round narratives are on the VMware interview experience page.
Managerial round
A discussion with a manager/lead on project ownership, team fit, and sometimes a lighter technical recap.
Common questions
- Walk me through the most complex project you’ve worked on
- A disagreement with a coworker over technical direction - how was it resolved?
- How do you prioritise when requirements change mid-project?
HR interview
A closing conversation on motivation, fit, and logistics.
Common questions
- Tell me about yourself and why VMware
- Describe a time you had to deal with a difficult manager or stakeholder
- Are you open to the offered location and any relocation?
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
Sample answer frameworks for each of these are on the VMware HR interview questions page.
The Broadcom acquisition and what it means for hiring
Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and has since restructured VMware’s product portfolio around its highest-margin enterprise lines, right-sizing engineering teams and adjusting compensation from pre-acquisition levels. India hiring, including internship recruiting, now runs through Broadcom’s Workday-based process on a more standardised annual cycle (postings in September-October, interviews wrapping by early spring). If you’re prepping for a “VMware” role today, you’re effectively interviewing with Broadcom - the interview content (OS, DSA, networking, Unix) has stayed consistent, but confirm the specific business unit and role are still active before committing prep time.
VMware vs Broadcom
VMware is no longer an independent company. Broadcom completed its acquisition in November 2023, so new VMware roles in India are posted and hired through Broadcom’s careers process, and offer letters come from Broadcom. Many people still search for “VMware interview questions” because the products and teams kept the VMware name.
This page covers interviews for VMware-branded software teams. The technical content (OS, Unix, networking, C++ or Java, DSA) has stayed consistent with older VMware reports, but hiring volumes, compensation and the business units that are hiring changed after the acquisition. Broadcom’s semiconductor and other software divisions run their own interviews, which this page does not cover.
Common technical interview questions and answers
Q: What is virtual memory and how does paging work?
Virtual memory gives each process its own contiguous address space that the hardware maps onto physical frames, so processes cannot read each other’s memory and the OS can over-commit RAM. The address space is split into fixed-size pages (commonly 4 KB) and physical memory into frames of the same size; a per-process page table records the virtual-to-physical mapping, and the MMU consults it on every access with a TLB caching recent translations. If a referenced page has no valid frame the MMU raises a page fault, the OS reads the page from disk into a free frame, updates the page table, and restarts the faulting instruction. Excessive faulting because the working set exceeds RAM is called thrashing, and it is why VMware-style memory over-commit needs ballooning and page sharing to stay usable.
Q: Compare process scheduling algorithms and their trade-offs.
First-Come-First-Served is trivial but suffers the convoy effect - one long job stalls everything behind it. Shortest-Job-First gives provably minimal average waiting time but needs future burst lengths, which you can only estimate, and it can starve long jobs. Round Robin gives each process a fixed time quantum and is the practical choice for interactive systems: too large a quantum degenerates to FCFS, too small and context-switch overhead dominates. Priority scheduling risks indefinite starvation of low-priority tasks, which is fixed by ageing - gradually raising the priority of a job that has waited a long time. Linux’s CFS instead tracks virtual runtime per task in a red-black tree and always runs the task with the least virtual runtime, approximating fair sharing.
Q: What is the difference between a process and a thread in Unix?
A process has its own virtual address space, file-descriptor table, and PID; a thread is a schedulable execution context inside a process that shares the address space, heap, and descriptors with its siblings while keeping its own stack, registers, and program counter. In Unix, fork() duplicates the calling process with copy-on-write page mappings, so the parent and child see separate memory once either one writes. Threads are created with pthread_create and are cheaper both to spawn and to context-switch, because the page tables and TLB entries stay valid. The trade-off is fault isolation: an unhandled segfault or corrupted pointer in one thread takes down the whole process.
Q: Explain Unix file permissions and what chmod 644 means.
Each file has three permission triads - owner, group, and others - each carrying read (4), write (2), and execute (1) bits. chmod 644 sets owner to 6 (read plus write), and group and others to 4 (read only), which is the normal mode for a regular data file. chmod 755 adds execute for everyone, which is what a script or a directory needs, since on a directory the execute bit means the right to traverse into it rather than to run it. Beyond the basic nine bits there are the setuid, setgid, and sticky bits - the sticky bit on /tmp is why any user can create files there but only the owner can delete their own.
Q: Walk through what happens in a TCP three-way handshake.
The client sends a SYN segment carrying its initial sequence number and moves to SYN_SENT. The server replies with SYN-ACK, acknowledging the client’s sequence number and supplying its own, and enters SYN_RECEIVED. The client sends a final ACK and both sides move to ESTABLISHED, at which point data can flow. The handshake exists so both sides agree on starting sequence numbers and confirm bidirectional reachability, which is exactly what UDP skips - it is connectionless, with no handshake, no ordering, and no retransmission, which is why it suits DNS lookups and live video where a late packet is worse than a lost one. Teardown is four-way (FIN, ACK, FIN, ACK) because each direction closes independently.
Q: Why does a C++ base class need a virtual destructor?
If you delete a derived object through a base-class pointer and the base destructor is not virtual, the behaviour is undefined - in practice only the base destructor runs, so the derived class’s members leak. Declaring the base destructor virtual makes destruction dispatch through the vtable, so the derived destructor runs first and then the base’s. The general rule is that any class intended for polymorphic use should have either a public virtual destructor or a protected non-virtual one. Making a destructor virtual costs one vtable pointer per object, which is why plain value types like a small Point struct should not have one.
Q: What is the difference between a shallow copy and a deep copy in C++?
A compiler-generated copy constructor copies members bitwise, so a raw pointer member ends up shared between the two objects - that is a shallow copy, and when both destructors run you get a double free, plus writes through one object silently corrupt the other. A deep copy allocates new storage and copies the pointed-to contents, so the objects are independent. This drives the Rule of Three: if you write a destructor, copy constructor, or copy assignment operator, you almost certainly need all three (Rule of Five once move operations are involved). Modern C++ avoids the whole class of bugs by holding resources in std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr, or std::vector, which get correct copy and move semantics for free.
Q: How do you find a cycle in a linked list without extra space?
Use Floyd’s tortoise-and-hare algorithm: advance a slow pointer one node at a time and a fast pointer two at a time. If the fast pointer reaches null the list is acyclic; if the pointers ever meet, there is a cycle. That is O(n) time and O(1) space, versus a hash set of visited nodes which is also O(n) time but O(n) space. To find the start of the loop, reset one pointer to the head and advance both one step at a time - they meet at the loop entry, which follows from the distances being congruent modulo the loop length. The loop length itself is found by walking one pointer round from the meeting point until it returns.
Q: What is the difference between a Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisor?
A Type 1 hypervisor (bare-metal, e.g. ESXi) runs directly on hardware and owns CPU scheduling and memory mapping for guest VMs. A Type 2 hypervisor (hosted, e.g. Workstation on a desktop OS) sits on top of a general-purpose OS, which adds an extra layer of scheduling and I/O. Enterprise data centers use Type 1 for isolation and performance; developers often use Type 2 locally for multi-OS testing. VMware interviews sometimes use this to check whether you understand where the hypervisor sits relative to the guest kernel.
Q: Explain vMotion at a high level.
vMotion live-migrates a running VM from one ESXi host to another with minimal downtime by copying memory pages over the network while the VM keeps executing, then switching execution once the working set is synchronized. It requires shared storage or replication, compatible CPU features (EVC can mask differences), and a reliable management network. Follow-ups often tie back to networking, memory over-commit, and failure handling - the same systems topics as OS and TCP questions elsewhere in the loop.
Frequently asked questions about VMware interviews
Does the VMware online test have negative marking?
Reports conflict. PrepInsta’s 2024 VMware pattern page says the test has negative marking, while first-hand campus reports on GeeksforGeeks do not mention it. The test runs on HirePro with separately timed sections, so assume a wrong MCQ answer can cost you and read the instruction screen.
What is the VMware online test pattern?
It is a HirePro test of about 90 minutes with separately timed sections: aptitude (about 15 minutes), technical MCQs on networking, OOP, OS and DBMS (about 30 minutes), one coding problem (30 minutes) and a programming-language MCQ section where you pick two of C, C++, Java and Python.
What is the VMware interview process for freshers?
VMware’s (now part of Broadcom) fresher process typically runs 4-5 stages: 1. Aptitude/online test (60-90 min). 2. Technical Interview Round 1 (45-60 min) - DSA, OS, networking, and C++. 3. Technical Interview Round 2 (45-60 min) - Unix, DBMS, problem-solving, and OS, with heavy focus on the technologies used in your projects. 4. Managerial round. 5. HR interview (30 min). Hiring now runs through Broadcom’s recruiting process; timelines have averaged around 2-3 weeks historically.
What questions are asked in VMware interviews?
Expect DSA coding problems, OS fundamentals (processes, memory management, scheduling), Unix/networking basics, and C++ questions. Puzzles of varying difficulty are also common for fresher loops. Since VMware builds virtualization software, interviewers probe how well you understand OS concepts at a level below typical application code - not just API usage.
How many rounds are there in the VMware interview?
Historically 4-5: an aptitude/online test, two technical interviews, a managerial round, and an HR round, though some drives run a leadership round as well. Since the Broadcom acquisition, hiring volumes and round structure can vary more by business unit than before.
How should I prepare for VMware interviews?
Prioritise OS fundamentals (processes, memory, scheduling), Unix basics, networking, and C++ - these show up more consistently here than at a typical web-product company. Practise DSA and be ready for logic puzzles. Know your projects well enough to explain the underlying technology choices, not just what you built.
Has VMware’s hiring changed since the Broadcom acquisition?
Yes. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and has since restructured the product portfolio, tightened cost structures, and adjusted compensation from pre-acquisition levels. India hiring, including internships, now runs through Broadcom’s recruiting systems on a more standardised annual cadence. The core technical interview content (OS, DSA, networking) hasn’t changed much, but confirm you’re applying to an active, retained business unit before investing prep time.
What is VMware/Broadcom’s fresher salary and eligibility?
Historical fresher packages at VMware India have been reported in the mid-20s to mid-30s LPA range with a typical eligibility bar around 7.5+ CGPA or 75%, though post-acquisition compensation and hiring volumes have shifted - always confirm current numbers on your specific offer letter.
How to prepare for VMware interviews
- Loop map: Aptitude / online test; Technical Interview Round 1; Technical Interview Round 2; Managerial round. Confirm timings from the drive mail.
- Technical depth: Drill the Q&A section until answers are spoken, not read. Know every resume project cold.
- Experiences: Study round-wise notes on the interview experience page - real prompts beat generic lists.
- HR: Three STAR stories + a specific “Why VMware?” on the HR page.
A practical VMware prep plan
Use this as a default four-week loop before a VMware drive. Adjust to your invite timeline.
- Week 1: Oa pattern first: sit one untimed paper, then redo it under the real clock. Open the VMware previous-year sets on this site and mark which sections ate your time. Write the timing on a sticky note. That number is more useful than a 200-problem LeetCode streak you never timed.
- Week 2: Most VMware drives fail people on the first timed paper or OA. Do three timed sits this week. After each one, log every miss in a two-column note: topic and why (slow, wrong formula, bad edge case, panic). The next sit should only add problems from that log.
- Week 3: Technical interviews at VMware usually want a clean project story, one or two CS fundamentals, and (if the process has it) a behavioral or values round. Write STAR stories on paper, not in your head. Practise “Why VMware?” with one concrete product, lab, or business line - not a slogan.
- Week 4: Star stories + one project walkthrough recorded on your phone. If you still have energy, redo only the questions you failed in week 2.
10-day crash version: Days 1-4 timed DSA, days 5-7 resume projects + CS fundamentals, days 8-9 mock interviews out loud, day 10 HR STAR stories on the HR page.
Compensation notes
Candidate-reported fresher/early-career packages for VMware often cite ₹18-30 LPA fresher MTS/SWE band (some reports toward ₹25-35). Treat forum numbers as ranges, not guarantees - confirm the written offer letter for your team and location.
Sources
Interview process details and sample questions on this site are editorially organized from public candidate reports and hiring write-ups, with round structure, prep notes, and company-specific framing added by our team. For round-by-round stories, see the VMware interview experience page. For OA papers and coding drills, use VMware on placementpapers.app. OA quick answers and role-wise questions draw on GeeksforGeeks VMware campus interview experiences (Intern + MTS and On-Campus 2022), PrepInsta’s VMware placement papers and pattern page (2024 pattern) and Glassdoor Broadcom interview reviews from 2021 to 2025 (read via search snippets); most of the detailed reports predate the Broadcom acquisition.