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1 VMware VSphere Interview Questions

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform that includes ESXi hypervisor, vCenter Server for centralized management, and other tools. This document provides answers to 23 questions about the core vSphere components and features to help VMware beginners understand the technology. Key features covered include vMotion for live migration of VMs, vSphere HA for high availability, DRS for load balancing, VSAN for shared storage, and vSphere Replication for disaster recovery.

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461 views

1 VMware VSphere Interview Questions

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform that includes ESXi hypervisor, vCenter Server for centralized management, and other tools. This document provides answers to 23 questions about the core vSphere components and features to help VMware beginners understand the technology. Key features covered include vMotion for live migration of VMs, vSphere HA for high availability, DRS for load balancing, VSAN for shared storage, and vSphere Replication for disaster recovery.

Uploaded by

singhdeepak87
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© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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VMware vSphere Interview Questions Part 1


July 5, 2014 in Interview Questions, VMware vSphere, vSphere Q&A

VMware infrastructure become very large day by day and VMware is keep on
integrating new technologies to their newer vSphere releases. Its becoming quite
difficult for VMware newbies to understand the technology and product
completely. This article will answer many questions for VMware beginners about
the VMware vSphere product offerings and features.I have not explained the
products and features very deeply but this one line answers will help you on
interviews to keep your answer short and sweet.
1.What are the products included in VMware vSphere 5.5 Bundle ?

VMware ESXi

VMware vCenter Server

VMware vSphere Client and Web Client

vSphere Update Manager

VMware vCenter Orchestrator

2.What type of Hyper-visor VMware ESXi is ?

VMware ESXi is Bare-metal hypervisor. You can directly install on server


hardware.

VMware Hypervisor
3.What is the role of VMware vCenter server?

vCenter provides a centralized management platform and framework for all


ESXi hosts and their respective VMs. vCenter server allows IT administrators to
deploy, manage, monitor, automate, and secure a virtual infrastructure in a
centralized fashion. To help provide scalability , vCenter Server leverages a backend database (Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle are both supported, among
others) that stores all the data about the hosts and VMs.

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vCenter Server Overview


4. Is it possible install vCenter server on Linux hosts ?

No.But Pre-build vCenter appliance is available in VMware portal which is


Linux based.You can import the appliance as virtual machine.
5.How to update the VMware ESXi hosts with latest patches ?

We can update the ESXi hosts using VMware Update Manager(VUM). We can
use this VUM add-on package on Windwos based vCenter server and Linux based
vCenter server (vCenter appliance)
6.What is the use of VMware vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client ?

vCenter Server provides a centralized management framework to VMware


ESXi hosts.To access vCenter server, you need vSphere client or vSphere Web
client service enabled.

vSphere Client
7.What is the difference between vSphere Client and vSphere web client ?

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vSphere Client is traditional utility which provides user interface to vCenter


server. But from VMware vSphere 5 onwards,vSphere web client is a
primary interface to manage vCenter server.For vSphere client, you need install
small utility .But vSphere Web client doent require any software. You can directly
connect using web browser.But still VUM is managed through vSphere Client .
vSphere Client:

vSphere Client Login


vSphere web-client:

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vSphere web client


8.What is the use of VMware vCenter Orchestrator ?

vCneter Orchestrator is used for automation on various vSphere products.


9.What are the features included in VMware vSphere 5.5 ?

vSphere High Availabitliy (HA)

vSphere Fault Tolerance

vSphere vMotion

vSphere Storage vMotion

vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

virtual SAN (VSAN)

Flash Read Cache

Storage I/O Control

Network I/O Control

vSphere Replication

10.What is the use of vSphere High Availability(HA)? Where it can be applied ?

VMware vSphere HA minimize the VMs unplanned downtime by restarting


the VM guests on next available server ESXi node inacase of failure on current
ESXI node. VMware HA must be enabled to reduce the VM unplanned downtime.

VMware HA
Please click page 2 to continue.
11. Will vSphere HA help on VM failures too ?

In an order to detect the VM failures, you need to enable VM Failure


Monitoring. So that it detects the Disk I/O and sends the internal heartbeat to

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check the VM all the time. If the VM is stopped functioning, VM will be restarted
automatically by vSphere HA.
12.What is the use of vMotion ?

Using vMotion feature,we can move the running VMs from one ESXi host to
another ESXi host without any downtime. vMotion copies the VMs in-memory
contents to the destination server and freeze the operation on current ESXi host
and resumes the VMs on remote ESXI node.

VMware vMotion
13.What is the use of Storage vMotion ?

vMotion is possible only when you have Shared storage like FC-SAN,ISCSI-SAN
or NFS. If you want to move the VM from one datastore to another datastore
without any downtime,then you need to perform storage vMotion.

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vMotion and Storage vMotion


Note: You can perform the vMotion and Storage vMotion together without any
downtime.
14.Why vMotion feature is not used/cant use in vSphere HA ?

vMotion is used for planned migrations and possible only where the source
and destination ESXI hosts are running properly.vSPhere HA is used to reduce the
downtime due to failures of physical ESXi hosts.So When the failure accours on
ESXi nodes, there is no time to perform vMotion and cant be used.
15.Is there any way to prevent the VMs unplanned downtime using vSphere HA ?

Yes.You can prevent the unplanned downtime using vSphere falut tollerance
along with vSphere HA.
16.How the vSphere Fault tolerance(FT) works ?

Using vLockstep technology , vSphere FT maintains the mirrored secondary


VM on different ESXi physical host that is kept in lockstep with the primary.So
when the primary ESXi node goes down due to hardware issue, secondary VM
will immediately step-in and provide the service. At this point, this VM will
become primary and secondary aka mirrored VM will be created on possible ESXI
host to prevent the further ESXi failure.

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VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)


17.What is vSphere DRS(Distributed Resource Scheduler) ? How it works ?

vSphere DRS is an intelligent frame works which always monitors the cluster
nodes health check and performs the vMotion automatically whenever required.
For an example ,if one of the ESXI cluster host memory has been utilized more
than 90% and due to that lot of paging happening on that server. vSphere DRS
detects such things in quick time and moves few VMs to another ESXi cluster to
least-balance the cluster nodes without any downtime by leveraging vMotion
functionality. It applies for high contention for CPU utilization too. So vSphere
DRS helps to balance the CPU & Memory utilization across the ESXi cluster
nodes.

Vmware DRS
18. What is vSphere storage DRS ? How it works ?

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vSphere Storage DRS like vSphere DRS but it applies to storage.It helps to
balance storage utilization and performance between data-stores on same ESXi
clusters.

`19.What is VSAN ? How it works ?

VSAN forms the storage pools across the multiple nodes using internal disks
and allows you to create a datastores that spans multiple ESXI hosts. VSAN also
protect the data using VM storage profiles and you can configure it according to
your requirement. You need SSDs(Solid State Drive) to configure VSAN. Click here
to learn more about VSAN.

VSAN overview
20.What is Flash Read Cache ?

vSphere 5.5 supports solid state drive through feature called Flash Read
Cache.Using Flash Read Cache, you can assign a caching space to VMs like how
are you assigning like CPU,Memory and other resources to VMs. Solid state drive
can provide much better that IOPS compare to normal disks.

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Flash Read Cache


21.What is the use of Storage I/O Control in vSphere 5.5 ?

You can limit the number of IOPS for each VM.


22.What is the use of network I/O control ?

Its similar to storage I/O control but its controls the VMs Network bandwidth.
23.What is vSphere Replication?

It replicates the complete VM from one datacenter to another datacenter on


per VM basis Unlike hardware replication.

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vSphere Replication
Hope I have mostly covered about all the vSphere products and it features in high
level.

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