Duncan Epping recently wrote an article about VMware related acronyms and shared with the community  the history and origins of some of the acronyms (e.g. ESX, GSX). After reading Duncan's article, I realized the acronym list primarily focused on product names and features. They did not cover some of the API related acronyms that I was curious about. If you have worked with the VMware APIs, SDKs or vmkernel, vmkwarning, hostd, vpxa, vpxd, etc. logs you may have noticed some of these acronyms and wondered what they actually stood for.

Here is my compiled list of VMware API related acronyms that I have been able to dig up by looking at these various locations:

DMS: Data Management Service
EAM: ESX Agent Manager
FDM: Fault Domain Manager
HMO: Host Managed Object
LS: License Service
MOB: Managed Object Browser
MOR: Managed Object Reference
OMS:  Operation Management Service
RBD: Rule Based Deployment (Auto Deploy)
SMS: Storage Monitoring Service
SPS:  Storage Policy Service
STOREMON: Storage Utilization Monitoring
VCI: (vci-integrity deals with VMware Update Manager, but no info on acronym)
VMAM: VM Application Monitoring
VMODL: VMware Managed Object Design Language
VMOMI: VMware Managed Object Management Interface
VOD: VPX Operational Dashboard
VOB/VOBD: VMkernel Observation 
VORB: VMOMI Object Request Broker Library/Application
VSM: vService Manager
VWS: VMware Web Services
WOE: Workflow Orchestration Engine

Disclaimer: These namespaces may change without notice as they are part of the internal VMware APIs. These are not publicly documented by VMware and should not be relied on other than for informative purposes.

There was also a recent VMTN question regarding the following two licensed features that is displayed for a given ESX(i) host and it was not clear what they were used for:

Here are the actual names and purposes:

dpvmotion: Direct Path vMotion (VM DirectPath I/O)
dvfilter: vNetwork Appliance API (dvfilter was an internal name)

The following are not VMware acronyms, but you may see these from time to time if you work with the vSphere API/SDKs:

API: Application Programming Interface
SDK: Software Developement Kit
WSDL: Web Services Definition Language
SOAP: Simple Object Access Protocol

I would also like to thank both Steve Jin and Reuben Stump from VMware in helping me track down the last few acronyms that I could not figure out.

If there are any additional acronyms that I missed or ones I should add to the list, please feel free to leave me a comment.