ESXLAB Certification Prep – ECVT – ECVS

1)      What is Virtualization?

• A Software abstraction that creates virtual hardware and maps it to the physical hardware.
• It is completely transparent to the guest OS and applications

2)      What are the components of VMware vSphere

•  VMware ESXi
  • Enterpriseclass server virtualization software
• Management, Performance, Monitoring
  • vCenter
• Load Balancing
  • vMotion, Storage vMotion and DRS Clusters
• High Availability
  • HA Clusters
• Planning, Deployment and Back Up
  • Capacity Planner, vCenter Converter, VMware Data Recovery
• Continuous Availability
  • VMware Fault Tolerance

3)      What are pre-virtualization server utilization rates:

• Pre-virtualization server utilization rates are very low.
• One OS/Application per server
• Fortune 1,000; 8% avg. utilization
• Typical utilization – 3-35%
• Usually one critical resource
• Other sub-systems mostly idle.

4)      What is server Consolidation?

• Many VM’s/physical server
• VMs compete for available host CPU, RAM, Disk, Network
• VMs get needed resources
• Not declared resources
• Idling VMs may give up CPU, RAM
• Administrators can tune VMs by using weighted scheduling, memory management and disk I/O

5)      Virtual Solution get generic hardware not physical hardware.

6)      Virtual Machines see:

• A virtual motherboard with chipset
• Virtual PCI video controller
• One to four virtual IDE CD/DVD devices
• One to four virtual Floppy Drives
• A virtual PCI bus
• Upto 8 virtual network interface cards (NICs)
• One to 4 virtual SCSI Host Bus Adapters (SCSI HBAs)
• Upto 15 virtual SCSI disk SCSI HBA
• Upto 8 Virtual CPU that map to physical CPU cores

7)      How to perform physical server maintenance on ESXi hosts:

• VMotion all VMs off the host that will be maintained
• Shut down and Power off the host when all fully evacuated to VMs
• Add, Upgrade, fix hardware
• Power on the server
• Rejoin Clusters
• Migrate VMs back to the fixed host

      vSphere Hardware Limits

1. VMware has license imposed hardware limits on physical servers and VMs based on CPU Cores and Memory

i.      ESX Host Physical Servers

• Max 256GB RAM (2TB forEnterprise+)
• Max 6 core physical CPUs (12 for Advanced andEnterprise+)
  • Virtual Machines
  • Max 4 Virtual CPUs per VM on most editions
  • Exception –Enterprise+ allows 8 vCPU VMs

9)      How many categories are available in VMware vCenter

• Four Categories are available:
  • Inventory
  • Administration
  • Management
  • Solutions and applications

10)   Virtual Solution: Low cost vSphere Standard Edition Supports

• 256GB physical RAM
• 1-6 core CPUs
• 1-32 GB NICs
• 1-4 10GB NICs
• Local, shared storage volumes, file shares
• Consolidate many VMs onto one host

11)   vSphere Standard Edition is a low cost version of VMware ESXi especially intended for entry level virtualization deployment with the ability to run up to 8 light duty or 2-4 medium duty VMs per CPU core

12)   ESXi is in full control of resource assignments to running VMs. The VMkernel, allocates hardware resources on an as-needed basis. In this way, the VMkernel can prevent idling VMs from wasting CPU cycles that could otherwise be used by busy VMs.

13)   The VMkernel keep track of needed RAM, not just requested or allocated RAM. It can dynamically re-assign RAM to memory starved VMs, thereby ensuring that VMs get the memory they need to run.

14)   ESXi Server Hardware

• CPUs
  • 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12 Core CPUs
  •  Max 128 Cores/host
  • Memory
    •  Min 2GB to boot
    • 256GB
    • 2TB onEnterprise+
    • Network
      • 1-32 GB NICs
      •  1-4 10GB NICs
      • VLAN, NIC Teams
      • Storage
        • Local volumes
          • SCSI, SAS SATA
          • RAID, non-RAID
• iSCSI SANs
• Fiber SANs
  • SAN 2, 4, 8 GB Fiber
  • ISCSI – 1 GB – Ethernet
  • File Shares
    • NFS only
    • No SMB support

15)   The installer will Wipe off all partitions on the selected target storage volume and creates partitions as needed (normally 8 partitions are created)

16)   By Default No Root account password, the first thing you should do is set the root account password.

17)   Three Types of Remote Access to ESXI server through hardware.

• HP – ILO (Integrated lights out)
• IBM – RSA (Remote Server Assistance)
• Dell – DRAC (Dell Remote access client.)

18)   ESXi can be integrated with Active Directory.

19)   All VMware Client/Server connections use 256-bit AES symmetric key encryption

20)   ESXi uses network time protocol to ensure that its clock remains accurate. It is important because ESXi host provides time service to all VMs.

21)   Always set your server BIOS clock to UTC and ensure you select Server Clock is UTC when you install ESXi

22)   Licenses can be configured in two places:

• vCenter
• vSphere

23)   Observed IP Range, helps you determine which sub-net a physical NIC can see – and consequently what traffic it should carry.