VMware 5.5

Question 1

Explain the VM big Picture

Answer 1

1. Hosts = Physical Machines;
2. Esxi creates the Virtual world on the Host;
3. Guests=VM machines that are stored on the Host
4. They are created and managed via Vsphere or Web interface.
5. Vm’s are separated logically into clusters for ease of management, Business requirements and performance.

Question 2

How do you set up a VLAN using VMware?

Answer 2

Physical Interface has to be set to Trunk and a needs to be tagged with a VLan number.

1. Vsphere,
2. Home/Inventory/Networking
3. Right Click VDS-LAN / Create New Port Group.
4. Set the Type to Vlan and then tag to correspond with physical VLan ID .
5. Virtual Switches port the VLANs to Physical switches.

Question 3

What is the difference between a Thick and Thin provisioning? Which is better?

Answer 3

Thick is default (Lazy Zero)–Thick provision lazy zeroed is a provisioning format for a virtual machine (VM) disk that creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. … Lazy zero means that blocks containing older data on the storage device are only cleared when the virtual machine writes new data to the disk for the first time.

Thin has a pitfall being over provisioning of your datastore.

As to which is better, that depends on

Question 4

What is the hard disk of the guest machine?

Answer 4

.VMDK is the hard disk of the Guest machine. VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines.

Question 5

What is Vmotion and what are the benefits?

Answer 5

Host goes down –vmotion to another host without taking the host machine offline–this is manually done.

VMware VMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity. It is transparent to users.

CPU type must be identical
Must have access to the same networks and data stores. (Check using Maps Host to network and Host to datastore.)
Both host need to have the Vmotion network configured (dedicated network)
How to check–select host/configuration tab/networking

Question 6

What is HA and what are the benefits?

Answer 6

High Availability feature that will sense (based on pre-defined configuration) when a Host is having difficulties and move the guest prior to the Host failing. Automatically.

Question 7

What is Fault Tolerance?

Answer 7

The Host fails before the move is made automatically