Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Nisar Ahmad August 16, 2017 Interview Questions, Training & Certifications, VSAN, vSphere 6.0
Interview questions, vCenter Server, VMware
VMware is the leader in Virtualization and Cloud Computing technologies and also providing solutions in the field of network and
desktop virtualization. VMware has changed the tech world from physical to software-based virtual world.
Due to the implementation of a virtual environment to consolidate the available hardware, the demands of subject matter experts
are increasing day by day in the market. To manage and maintain organization’s business, an experienced workforce is required,
and to choose the top talent from the market for growing an organization’s business, professionals are selected via many
technical interviews and HR processes.
Learn more
Along with the HR processes, technical interviews are also conducted to assess the abilities of a professional in the field of
virtualization for continues business process. Here are 80 interview questions on data center virtualization technology fresher
and up to 3 years of hands-on experience that may be asked to assess the candidate’s technical and hands-on expertise.
Note: I’ve also created an Android app for these questions. You can download from the Google Play store. If you’re interested
in vSphere 6.5 certification, Pass the VMware vSphere 6.5 Foundations exam – PRACTICE TEST will help you to pass the
exam.
These interview questions are categorized into the following technical areas:
Hypervisor
Fault Tolerance (FT)
Virtual Networking
vCenter Server
Virtual Storage (Datastore)
What’s New in vSphere 6.0
Content Libraries
vSAN
vApp and
Miscellaneous
Hypervisor
1. What is VMKernel and why it is important?
VMkernel is a virtualization interface between a Virtual Machine and the ESXi host which stores VMs. It is responsible to allocate
all available resources of ESXi host to VMs such as memory, CPU, storage etc. It’s also controlled special services such as
vMotion, Fault tolerance, NFS, traffic management and iSCSI. To access these services, VMkernel port can be configured on
ESXi server using a standard or distributed vSwitch. Without VMkernel, hosted VMs cannot communicate with ESXi server.
A hypervisor is a virtualization layer that enables multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Each operating
system or VM is allocated physical resources such as memory, CPU, storage etc by the host. There are two types of hypervisors
3. What is Virtualization?
The process of creating virtual versions of physical components i-e Servers, Storage Devices, Network Devices on a physical
host is called virtualization. Virtualization lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine which is called ESXi
host.
Server virtualization: consolidates the physical server and multiple OS can be run on a single server.
Network Virtualization: Provides complete reproduction of physical network into a software-defined network.
Storage Virtualization: Provides an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to manage and optimize in virtual
deployment.
Application Virtualization: increased mobility of applications and allows migration of VMs from a host on another with minimal
downtime.
Desktop Virtualization: virtualize desktop to reduce cost and increase service
The communication between two ESXi hosts is called FT logging when FT is configured between them. The pre-requisition of
configuring FT is to configure VMKernel port.
The main difference between VMware HA and FT is: HA is enabled per cluster and VMware FT is enabled per VM. In HA, VMs
will be re-started and powered-on on another host in case of a host failure, while in FT there is no downtime because the second
copy will be activated in case of host failure.
Virtual Networking
11. What is virtual networking?
A network of VMs running on a physical server that is connected logically with each other is called virtual networking.
vSS stands for Virtual Standard Switch is responsible for communication of VMs hosted on a single physical host. it works like a
physical switch automatically detects a VM which want to communicate with other VM on a same physical server.
vDS stands for Virtual Distributed Switch acts as a single switch in a whole virtual environment and is responsible to provide
central provisioning, administration, and monitoring of the virtual network.
VMKernel adapter provides network connectivity to the ESXi host to handle network traffic for vMotion, IP Storage, NAS, Fault
Tolerance, and vSAN. For each type of traffic such as vMotion, vSAN etc. separate VMKernal adapter should be created and
configured.
17. What is the main use of port groups in data center virtualization?
You can segregate the network traffic by using port groups such as vMotion, FT, management traffic etc.
18. What are three port groups are configured in ESXi networking?
A logical configuration on the switch port to segment the IP Traffic where each segment cannot communicate with other
segments without proper rules mentioned is called VLAN and every VLAN has a proper number called VLAN ID.
The practice of inserting VLAN ID into a packet header to identify which VLAN packet belongs to is called VLAN tagging.
Promiscuous mode
MAC address change
Forged transmits
The default mode of this policy is Reject. If the Accept is selected, a host will accept requests to change the effective MAC
address.
The default mode is Reject. If Accept is selected, a host will not compare the source and effective MAC address transmitted from
a VM.
vCenter Server
25. What are the main components of vCenter Server architecture?
PSC stands for Platform Services Controller first introduced in version 6 of VMware vSphere which handles infrastructure
security functions. It has three main components.
Embedded
centralized
Embedded Deployment
External deployment
vROP provides the operation dashboards for performance analytics, capacity optimization and monitoring the virtual
environment.
30. What is the basic security step to secure vCenter Server and users?
Authenticate vCenter Server with Active Directory. By using this we can assign specific roles to users and can also manage the
virtual environment in an efficient way.
Datastore is a storage location where virtual machine files are stored and accessed. Datastore is based on a file system which is
called VMFS, NFS.
Vmdk is a VM disk file and stores data of a VM. It can be up to 62 TB in size in vSphere 6.0 version.
1. Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroes: every virtual disk is created by default in this disk format. Physical space is allocated to a VM
when a virtual disk is created. It can’t be converted to thin disk.
2. Thick Provision Eager Zeroes: this disk type is used in VMware Fault Tolerance. All required disk space is allocated to a VM
at time of creation. It takes more time to create a virtual disk compare to other disk formats.
3. Thin provision: It provides an on-demand allocation of disk space to a VM. When data size grows, the size of a disk will grow.
Storage capacity utilization can be up to 100% with thin provisioning.
4. What is Storage vMotion?
It is similar to traditional vMotion, in Storage vMotion, a virtual disk of a VM is moved from datastore to another. During Storage
vMotion, virtual disk types think provisioning disk can be transformed to thin provisioned disk.
Version 11
Version 13
Platform Services Controller (PSC) is introduced in vSphere 6.0. vSphere 6.0 is also known as Virtual hardware version 11.
39. How many maximum hosts can manage a vCenter Server in vSphere 6.0?
In vSphere 6.0, a single vCenter Server can manage up to 1000 hosts either in Windows or in vCenter Appliance (vCSA).
Virtual Volume a new VM disk management concept introduced in vSphere 6.0 that enables array-based operations at the virtual
disk level. VVol is automatically created when a virtual disk is created in a virtual environment for a VM.
Standard Edition: Contains 1 vCenter Server Standard license, up to 2 vCPUs for Fault Tolerance, vMotion, Storage vMotion,
HA, VVols etc.
Enterprise Edition: Same as Standard Edition additionally APIs for Array Integration and Multipathing, DRS, and DPM.
Enterprise Plus: Includes all features of Standard and Enterprise Editions with additionally Fault Tolerance upto 4 vCPUs and
64GB of RAM. It also includes Distributed vSwitch and the most expensive licensing option of vSphere 6.0.
44. How much Maximum RAM can support vSphere 6.0?
Content Libraries
45. What is the Content Library?
Content Library is the central location point between two different geographical locations with vCenter Servers where you can
store VM templates, ISO images, scripts etc. and share them between geographical locations
We create VM templates and can share on another geographical location of a company without creating again on other
locations. It has many benefits such as sharing and consistency, storage efficiency, and secure subscription.
VMFS is a file system for a VM in VMware vSphere. VMFS is a datastore that responsible for storing virtual machine files. VMFS
can also store large files which size can up to 64TB in vSphere 6.0
VSAN
50. What is vSAN?
Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage first introduced in vSphere 5.5 and is fully integrated with vSphere. It aggregates
locally attached storage of ESXi hosts which are part of a cluster and creates a distributed shared solution.
51. What is cold migration?
Hybrid: Uses both flash-based and magnetic disks for storage. Flash are used for cashing, while magnetic disks are used for
capacity or storage.
All-Flash: Uses flash for both caching and for storage
54. Are there VSAN ready nodes are available in the market?
Yes, vSAN-ready such as VxRail 4.0 and 4.5 are available in the market. VxRail is the combination of min 3 servers which are
part of a cluster and can scale up to 64 servers.
To configure a vSAN, you should have minimum 3 ESXi hosts/servers in the form of a vSAN cluster. If one of the servers fails, a
vSAN cluster will fail.
56. How are many maximum ESXi hosts allowed for vSAN?
57. How many disk groups and max magnetic disks are allowed in single disk group?
Maximum 5 disk groups are allowed on an ESXi host which is a part of a vSAN cluster and a maximum of 7 magnetic and 1 SSD
per disk group is allowed.
58. How many types of storages can we use in our virtual environment?
Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is a file stored in a VMFS volume that acts as a proxy for a raw physical device. RDM enables you
to store virtual machine data directly on a LUN. RDM is recommended when a VM must interact with a real disk on the SAN.
An iSCSI SAN consists of an iSCSI storage system, which contains one or more storage processors. TCP/IP protocol is used to
communicate between host and storage array. an iSCSI initiator is configured with the ESXi host. an iSCSI initiator can be a
hardware-based either dependent or independent and software-based known as iSCSI software initiator.
vApp
64. What is vApp?
vApp is a container or group where more than one VM can be package and manage multi-tiered applications for specific
requirements for example, Web server, database server, and application server can be configured as a vApp and can be defined
their power-on and power-off sequence.
We can configure several settings for vApp such as CPU and memory allocation, and IP allocation policy etc.
Miscellaneous
66. What is VMware DRS?
DRS stands for Distributed Resource Scheduler; that automatically balances available resources among various hosts by using
cluster or resource pools. With the help of HA, DRS can move VMs from one host to another to balance the available resources
among VMs.
Share: A value that specifies the relative priority or importance of a VM access to given resource.
Limit: Consumption of a CPU cycle or host physical memory that cannot cross the defined value (limit).
Learn more
Reservation: This value defines in the form of CPU or memory and must be available for a VM to start.
An alarm is a notification which appears when an event occurs. Many default alarms exist for many inventory objects. Alarms
can be created and modified using vSphere Web Client;
69. What are the hot-pluggable devices which can be added while VM is running?
When a VM is converted into a format which can be used to create a VM with pre-defined settings is called a template. An
installed VM can be converted into a template but it cannot be powered-on.
To create a copy of a VM with the timestamp as a restore point is called a snapshot. Snapshots are taken when an upgrade or
software installation is required. For better performance, a snapshot should be removed after a particular task is performed.
73. What is vMotion and what is the main purpose to use it in a virtual environment?
It is a very prominent feature of VMware vSphere used to live migrate running VMs from one ESXi host to another without any
downtime. Datastores and ESXi hosts both can be used while vMotion.
A clone is a copy of a virtual machine. By cloning a VM, it will save time if multiple VMs with the same configurations are
required to configure. While a template is a master copy of an image created from a VM which can be later used to create many
clones. After converting a VM to a template, it can’t be powered-on or edited.
Network Heartbeat
Datastore Heartbeat
When HA is enabled in a cluster, all hosts take part in a selection process to be selected as a master host. A host which has the
highest number of datastores mounted will be selected as a master host. All other hosts will remain slave hosts.
It is a suite of utilities which are used to enhance the performance of a VM in the form of graphics, mouse/keyboard movement,
network card, and other peripheral devices.
Stands for Distributed Power Management is a feature of VMware DRS is used to monitor required resources in a cluster. When
the resources are decreases due to low usage, VMware DPM consolidates workloads and shut down the hosts which are not
being used, and when resources are increased it automatically power on the un-used hosts.
It is a command-line interface is used to run repair and diagnostics of ESXi hosts. It can be accessed via DCUI, vCenter Server
enable/disable, and via SSH.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this post. Thanks for reading! Be social and share it to social media if you feel worth sharing it.
Share this:
Related
VMware Certifications Roadmap: VMware Announced Four New VMworld 2017 Day 1
Overview and Career Paths Courses in July 2016 Announcements
June 20, 2016 July 20, 2016 September 1, 2017
In "Training & Certifications" In "Training & Certifications" In "NSX"
Comments (75)
Fantastic collection !
Thanks!
Excelente!!!!!!!
Nisar Ahmad (Post author) February 26, 2018 at 8:56 pm
Thanks!
thanks Nisar
Welcome!
Hi Ahmad thanks for sharing me i got a job . i need online training can you help me if you comfortable .
Hello, I am working with wipro as a VMware administrator, if you want training with real time scenario, daya to day activity,
kindly contact us to discuss on detail
Hey Nisar, seriously very helpful, great job. Thanks and Good Luck
Thanks Nisar Ahmed for nice work… However do you have questions and answers for SME level.
Thanks for the complement Pranesh. Sorry, I don’t have Q&As currently regarding SME level.
Welcome!
Many resources are available. You can create a home lab, hands-on labs are also available. Follow this official
link for Getting started with vSphere 6.5 lab https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vsphere-
start-18-hol. VMware Virtualization 101 Hands-on Lab https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?
p=virtualization-18-hol
Welcome.
yuvi March 24, 2018 at 1:05 am
Hi! Good numbers of QandA. But the question no. 55 the answered you shared that in the event of one VSAN node faliure the
entire cluster will fail is not true. Because the default policy is set FTT to 1 wh8ch means one node faliure ia tollarable.
Thanks for the comments. Minimum requirements for a vSAN Cluster is 3 nodes (without configuring witness
node). If one node (with only 3 nodes in vSAN cluster) will fail, your cluster will fail.
Thanks.
Welcome.
(Post author)
Nisar Ahmad June 3, 2018 at 9:44 pm
Thanks Thangathurai!
Welcome!
excellent notes.
Thanks!
Liyakat Shaikh July 7, 2018 at 11:57 am
Hey Nisar thank you for posting such important questions I really appreciate your efforts
Thanks Sumit!
Awesome collection
(Post author)
Nisar Ahmad August 23, 2018 at 10:46 am
Thanks Sonu!
Thanks Vijay and stay tuned, I’m also working on vSAN 6.2 exam and interview questions and will be shared
soon.
Thanks, Shubham!
Thanks, Stephen.
Thanks, bro…
Haseeb September 23, 2018 at 3:14 pm
Assalamu Alaikum Nisar bhaiya. Looking for job change. Need some technical guidance. My email ID-
haseehas2806@gmail.com. Can you email me personally?
If you are looking for job in VMware pls contact me 8149062096, I will help to get job in VMware
Thanks Maher!
(Post author)
Nisar Ahmad October 10, 2018 at 9:33 pm
Thanks bro!
Thanks, Satish!
Nice collection
Thanks, Kubaib!
thanks for your efforts…you have more scenario based questions and answers
Thanks Dhananjay, I also wrote scenario based questions, you can find here
https://www.myvirtualjourney.com/40-scenario-based-vmware-interview-questions-answers/
Commendable!!
Thanks!
Unfolding Workforce Mobility November 22, 2018 at 8:22 pm
Thanks for the kind words. Sure I’ll update it with vSphere 6.7 maximums.
What is recommended.. self studying or join a class n then go for certification.. I have experience in office 365 and service desk
but I want to move into virtualization
Self-study is required to learn this technology, while for earning a certification, you’ll have to attend an official
class, otherwise, you’ll not get the certificate from VMware Inc.