Vmware Certified Professional Sample Questions and Answers Version 1.

By Mike Laverick RTFM Education Contact: mikelaverick@rtfm-ed.co.uk

Caveats & Disclaimers

These are not real questions that is called cheating These are questions were made up by me so they are NOT a guide for what you will be tested on They are not in the format of the exam which is multiple/single choice, currently non-adaptive. The real exam is currently a 70% pass mark for Students and 85% pass mark for instructors 80 questions in 80 minutes Remember, currently to be certified you must attend the Vmware Authorised Training course Systems Administration II Some of them are there as much to make teaching points as to test your knowledge If you spot any errors or think you could add some questions based on your knowledge/experience by all means tell me, and I will update/correct this document As ever this document is released as is and without warranty How to use this document: o o The answers are all in a white font Printout as is do the test Then come back to this file, highlight all the text and change font colour to be black to see the answers with a little bit of explanation of why the answer is what it is

o YES! It really is that sophisticated but what do you expect for

nothing! Change Log from 1.1 to 1.2 Added questions 80 to 137 Corrected an incorrect question to do with switches on vmkfstools Tidied up the phraseology and grammar of the questions Change Log from 1.2 to 1.3 My build was upgraded to 2.5 Added extra question about physical and virtual CPUs Added extra question about if you can use ps ef to see the number of vms running Change the answers to questions to reflect proper syntax of vmhba:W:X:Y:Z naming convention Added one extra question about export disks and space consumed by them

1. What is the disadvantage of using automatic partitioning in the

installation It is a linux installer and will create a swap partition the size of the total physical RAM rather than 2x The amount allocated to the service console

2. How many virtual network cards can be supported in each VM?

4

3. There are 3 types of switch are supported by ESX

internal/inbound, external/outbound and NIC Teamed. How does the Service Console refer to these and where does it map the PCI values to the devices? vmnetn, vmnicn, bondn The mapping is held in devname.map

4. What are the four virtual disk modes and how do they work?
Persistent - Like a normal disk, all files a written to the disk file Non-Persistent - Changes are discarded at power off Undoable - Changes go to a REDO file, commit, append, discard Append - Changes go to a REDO file, no options like Undoable

5. What is the name given to the default network driver in the MUI
when you first install a guest OS and what are its limitations vlance emulates a AMD PCnet card can be CPU intensive not an idealised driver for virtualisation

6. Once Vmware Tools has been installed to the guest OS you can use
a optimised network driver what is this called in the MUI? vmxnet

7. Apart from the optimised network driver what else does VM tools
provide? Synchronisation of time, Soft power options and scripts, Heartbeat signal, Balloon Memory Driver (memctrl)

8. Scripts are provided for which power options?

Power Up, Power Down, Suspend/Resume there is no script available for reset as this is covered by the power up script

9. Name two ways by which could register a Virtual Machine?

By clicking the VMX file in the MUIs file manager and choosing the register option By using vmware-cmd at the Service Console with the s register

switch

10. What properties of VM can you change while it is powered on?

Practically, anything can be changed about a VM if you are prepared to use the Service Console and utilities /proc/vmware/vm/WMID Value You can change the removable devices such as floppy, network, CDROM You cannot add hardware, you cannot handle CPU, SCSI, Disk, Display in the hardware page

11. Can a VM Administrator (user account held in the MUI) modify

CPU, Memory, Disk, Network resource settings in the properties of a Virtual Machine? No, only root can modify these The VM admin has rights to Hardware tab, Parts of the Options tab This is to stop a VM Admin from modifying the VMs resources at the expense of other VMs managed and owned by another VM Administrator

12. You need to restart the MUI from the Service Console how would
you do this? with service httpd.vmware restart or /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware restart

13. An orange triangle appears in the MUI next to one of your VMs
what does it mean? An event has occurred in the VMs console which needs acknowledging by the operator such as when you shutdown a VM with an undoable disk you are asked if you wish to Keep, Commit, or Discard the REDO file

14. Does the VMID change each time you start a VM or does it stay the
same? It changes every time, as it is regarded as a new process by the VM Kernel. Will be new on first boot, and any subsequent cold boot power off and power on. It would be unaffected by a soft reboot. Generally it increments this by a factor of 1, so if it was 140 when you shutdown it will probably be 141 if you power it up.

15. What is the name of the file that is created when you suspend a
VM, and by default where is it created? Can it be created in a different location? It will be called machinename-randomnumber.vmss and will be created next to the corresponding vmdk file on a VMFS partition.

You can ask for the Suspend file to be created on different VMFS partition if one is available in the options page of the virtual machine

16. If a VM has 2 Virtual CPUs what % maximum would set as default

on CPU cycles 200% - 100% for the first CPU, plus 100% for the second CPU

17. You have a CPU intensive VM what could you do to manage this
VM? The operator could give it a higher share value than other VMs this would affect the performance of the other VMs. You could stop soft affinity and peg or hardcode the VM to run from a dedicated CPU

18. Can ESX handle outbound network traffic and what options exist
explain these options? Yes, but not inbound traffic need 3rd party traffic management tools The term is Traffic Shaping You can set Average, Peak, and Burst Average is normal network activity Peak is the maximum network allowed through the adapter Burst is the amount of data that could be sent when peak was met before ESX would throttle the system back down to Average

19. You have 4 VMs currently each set with 1000 shares each. You
wish to add a new VM and have consume 50% of the with the remaining VM sharing the other 50% what share value would you allocate to the 5th VM? 4000. Total currently is 4000 shares, for the new VM to get twice as much it would need 4000 shares. The new total would be 8000 with the 5th VM getting of all the ESX server resources.

20. ESX uses this syntax vmbhaN:N:N:N locate disk storage either
locally or on a SAN. What do each of these numbers mean? Use the CTLP acronym. Controller, SCSI Target, LUN, and Partition CLT starts with 0 P starts with 1

21. What might this syntax mean vmhba1:1:1:0?

It is unusual in the sense that partition numbers normally begin with 1 not 0. This normally indicates a disk that is not yet partitioned.

22. What would be the vmhba syntax to a disk which is the 5th

partition, on the 3rd LUN, accessed by the 2nd HBA, and is a redundant link to the 2nd Controller/Storage Port on a SAN?

vmhba1:1:2:5 2nd HBA would 1, the 2nd controller on the SAN (normally called a storage port), the 3rd LUN would 2, and the 5th partition is 5. VMware do recommend one VMFS volume/partition per LUN

23. You have a server with just a SCSI adapter which does not support
local RAID configurations your VMFS partition is a local one stored on the first disk, and is the 10th partition and the server only has one SCSI adapter. What would be the vmhba syntax? vmhba0:0:0:10 There is only one SCSI adapter so that is 0, as it is the first SCSI disk in the chain (the boot disk) then it would be 0 too. As no RAID configuration is supported the LUN number will be 0 indicating one flat disk therefore one LUN, the 10th partition would make the last number 10

24. What are the permissions required to allow one user to view and
connect to another users virtual machine using Remote Console? You need RX on the VMX file, and on the directories that lead to that file

25. What is the default permission on a monolithic virtual disk file

that normally has the VMDK extension? RW for the Owner of the VM, other users who have delegated rights DO NOT need rights to the VMDK file. It is loaded in the context of the Owner of the VM at power-up

26. What rights are required to de-register a VM?

RWX on the VMX and all other directories that lead to the file

27. What is the maximum number of registered machines?

80, but if you have more than 60 you have modify significantly the resources given to the Service Console and its service/daemons including but not restricted to its allocation of RAM

28. What are the minimum & maximum amounts of RAM assignable to
the Service Console Minimum is 192, which allows 8 VMs to run The is an other option which allows a maximum of 800MG

29. Direct logons by ROOT to the Service Console via SSH have been
disabled by modifying the sshd.config file. How would you gain access? Logon as your ordinary user account Then use su -

Provide the roots password

30. What is name given to the service that handles authentication to

third party directory services such as an NT4 domain or Active Directory Domain? The PAM Pluggable Authentication Modules

31. What ports are allowed under high security

HTTPS 443 902 For Remote Console and vCenter 22 for SSH Non-secure protocols such as http (80), ftp (20/21), telnet (23), portmap (111) are disabled

32. You need to alter the usage of PCI device between the Service
Console and the VM Kernel. Due to a problem with the MUI, you have only access to the Service Console. What command would you use? vmkpcidivy i the interactive mode gives you prompts and menu to change if the device is used by the Service Console (c), used by the VM Kernel (v) or shared (s)

33. Apart from PCI devices four other attributes can you alter with the
vmkpcidivy tool? Boot Option Change Boot Name Memory allocated to the Service Console Enable or disable hyper-threading support

34. You know you have 4 Physical CPUs but the MUI is showing 8 in
the Scheduling Affinity options on a VM. Why? The 4 CPUs have been enabled in the BIOS for hyper-threading. Each CPU package is offering two logical CPUs each. 4x2 equals 8

35. You are configuring a cluster-in-a-box system what VMFS

access mode would you use and what would the bus sharing be set to on the second SCSI adapter in each VM. What would be network configuration be? You would use PUBLIC as the access mode. VIRTUAL for the Bus Sharing as a cluster in a box scenario the two virtual machines communicate to the Quorum and Shared disks using virtual hardware. The heartbeat network would be internal switch with no physical NICs attached, the public network would be an external switch with physical NICs attached to allow end-users to connected to the clustered application

36. In the scenario above could the VMDK files (boot, quorum, shared)
all be on the SAME VMFS partition/LUN Yes. The VMFS file system and the VM Kernel would be able to update its metadata and quickly release and engage SCSI reservations, whilst ensuring no read/write corruption occurs

37. You are configuring two VMs running on two separate ESX servers
for a cluster-across-boxes. What would be the VMFS access mode, what would be the bus sharing mode, and could you use VMFS labels to indicate the location of the VMDK file for the Quorum and Shared disks? What would be network configuration

VMFS would be set to be SHARED. This switches OFF the SCSI Reservations done by the VM Kernel, and instead engages hardware reservations on the LUN. The reservations stop read/writes errors occurring on the VMDK files. The bus sharing would be set to PHYSICAL, as both VMs would be using physical hardware to access the LUN on remote storage (RAID or SAN) You would have to use vmhbaA:T:L:V format (not volume labels) to point to the Quorum and Shared disks as the reservations would lock access to the VMFS metadata where labels are stored. The network would be 2xExternal switches for the heartbeat and public network. As the VMs reside on two separate ESX servers their only way of communicating is via physical networking, not virtual

38. Could you put all the VMDK files on the same VMFS partition/LUN
in the scenario above No. Hardware reservations could stop access to the VMDK files that were present on the SAME LUN. You would need a LUN for the Quorum and Shared disks, and LUN for your boot disks

39. You are configuring one VM's running on an ESX servers for a

"clustering physical to virtual". What would the disk mode be, what would be the "bus sharing" mode, and could you use labels to indicate the location of the VMDK file for the Quorum and Shared disks? What would be network configuration? The disk mode would have to be System/LUN on a NTFS, or EXT3 partition. The physical machine - what ever the OS is - does not understand VMFS or VMDK files. A VMFS partition would be required for the VMs boot disk only. The bus sharing would be physical. As VMFS is not being used as the files system for the Quorum and Shared disks then vmhbaA:T:L:V would have to be used. As there is a mix of physical and virtual machines an external switch would be used for both the heartbeat and public network

40. Could you put the all the VMDK files on the same VMFS
partition/LUN in the scenario above? Yes, most likely as all the VMFS is storing is the VMs boot disk and not the Quorum or Shared disks.

41. The format of shared is normally only used for a quorum and
shared disks in a clustered configuration. What problems may you encounter if you use a shared LUN for other file formats? Should only be used for Quorum & Shared Disk Because of SCSI reservations it can stop access to other files on the SAME LUN So, Suspended VMs would not resume because of the reservation on the LUN For the same reason, If you have a swap file on the SAME LUN as the Quorum & Shared disk the swap file would become inaccessible

42. What is the default policy on SANs for Fail-Over and what type of
SAN would use this configuration MRU, most recently used a active/passive SAN would use this policy

43. What other policy option exists for SANs for fail-over, and what
type of SAN would use this configuration Fixed a active/active SAN would use this policy

44. In a fully redundant fabric SAN two paths exist from one
server to the SAN. You can set the preferred path using the MUI there are 3 colour codes which indicate status green, orange and red. What do they signify? Green Active and data is being sent successfully Orange Path is disabled and is available for activation Red Should be active, but system cannot connect to LUN

45. How many VM Kernel swap files can you have?

One if your using the MUI 8 if you using vmkfstools from the Service Console

46. What are the names and locations VM Kernel log files controlled by
syslog.d? vmkwarning, vmkernel, vmksummary so anything beginning with vmk is vmkernal log file others like messages are service console log files they are located at /var/log/

47. You create a VM with 512MG of RAM. The VM Kernel reserves this

memory for future use. How much PHYSICAL ram would it reserve and how much VIRTUAL ram would it reserve in the VM Kernel swap file? 256MG of Physical RAM

256MG of Virtual RAM A 50% split

48. When does ESX use the VM Kernel swap file?

You only get significant activity in the vmkernal swap (which would effect performance when ALL physical RAM has been depleted. Remember when you power on a VM the default is half its RAM allocation is reserved in physical RAM and the other half is reserved in the swapfile. Thus powering up a VM does create a nominal amount of swap activity. Lack of swap or RAM can stop a virtual machine powering up

49. Which daemons make up Vmwares SNMP implementation what

dependencies exist? Master Daemon (snmpd) and the Sub-Agent (vmware-snmpd) The agent cannot run without a master The master can be replace with a 3rd party deamon If you want very specific ESX snmp data you need the agent

50. What is the name and location of the configuration file for SNMP?
/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

51. You need to install the MIBs for ESX to you HP Open-view
management system, where are on the ESX server are the MIBs located? /usr/lib/vmware/snmp/mibs/

52. You wish to see more detailed information about a VMFS volume
called /vmfs/local. Using vmkftools how would you display this? use vmkfstools P /vmfs/local. Displays extents, volume label, UUID, true location in the vmhba format

53. You have done some extensive changes to the SAN storage

created and delete LUNs for example. Now one of the VMs will not boot anymore and comes up with an error that it cannot locate its VMDK file. Why might this be? If you use vmhba as the method of pointing to the disk file then changes can stop a VM correctly locating the VMDK file. If you had used labels instead this would not have happened. Exception when labels cannot be used in cluster-across-boxes, and physical-to-virtual clustering scenarios

54. You wish to create VMFS partition, and then create a vmdk file on
it using vmkfstools. What switches would you use -C in upper-case to create a VMFS partition

-c in lower-case to create a vmdk file

55. You wish export and then import a virtual disk. What switches
would you use and what would the paths be? -e to export -i to import you always specify a COW (VMDK) format on EXT3 partition FIRST, and then MONOLITHIC (VMDK) on a VMFS last

56. You need to increase the size of a virtual disk. How do you do this
use x 4096m to extend to the needed size create a new partition to address the new space OR use a 3rd party partition re-sizer such as Volume Manager to increase the size of an existing partition

57. One of VMs crashes, even when switched off you still cannot
manipulate the files and the Service Console reports that file is locked and in use. But you know its not. How would you release the file? Use vmkfstools R to recover access to the file

58. You have a clustered-across-boxes scenario. One of the VMs has

crashed, and the other partner in the cluster is switched off. When you attempt to access the vmfs partition to do file management you receive a message saying the files are locked. How would you release this? You could use vmkfstools L release To release the SCSI reservation that was placed by the failed component on the cluster In brief, -R is used for general problems with files on a VMFS partition, -L is only used in clustered scenarios

59. You need the change the disk mode options on the on the first

HBA, which is on the first SP on the SAN, which is the 4th LUN, and the 10th partition what would type with vmkfstools? vmkfstools F shared vmhba0:0:3:10

60. How many LUNs does ESX scan for by default, and how do you
change it? 0-7, 8 LUNS in total. You change DiskMaxLUN in the Advanced Settings options to go beyond 8

61. You can set multi-path settings in the MUI, but you can also do this
via the command vmkmultipath what are its switches? -q to display the lists of paths -s to set a path, -e to enable, -d to disable, and r to set the

preferred path when more than one exists

62. In which file is the relationship between the PCI Bus, Function
and Slot number and the VM device (vmnic, vmhba) mapped /etc/vmware/devnames.conf

63. Another way shares can be set is by friendly names of High,

Normal, Low. What is the weighting given to these labels "Normal" share allocation is twice "Low" "High" share allocation is twice "Normal In numerical terms this would be: 500, 1000, 2000

64. You have 8 identical web servers running on single CPU systems
with 512MG of RAM each. If we assume that that these webservers do occasionally use a significant proportion of this RAM. How much TOTAL RAM would be needed on your server to accommodate these machines if you were to port them to one ESX server? Total on physical = 8*512MG = 4096MG + 24MG for VM Kernel Virtualisation layer + 192MG for the Service Console for 8 machines + 6% of the Total for the amount reserved for peak-usage by the Kernel +8*54MG for the overhead of breaking through the 512MG/VM machine or 24+192+(1.06 * 8 * (512+54)) = 5016MG

65. What is the virtualisation overhead?

5016-4096=920MG

66. Now assume that 10% of RAM is saved through the Memory Page
Sharing method what would be the overhead then? 4096*10% = 409.6MG 920-409.6=510MG

67. Now assume that 25% of RAM is saved through the Memory Page
Sharing method what would be the overhead then 4096*25%=1024MG It has removed the overhead ESX would physically provide 3096MG to 8 VMs Whereas the physical servers would consume 4096MG By using transparent page sharing the ESX VMs would require less memory. Total Amount RAM now need would 5016-1024=3992MG Although there is virtualisation overhead this is cancelled out by

Transparent Memory Sharing Put another way we need one server with the same memory resources that 8 used to provide

68. You have had a purple screen of death on the ESX server. You

reboot it and it works again perhaps this has been caused by a memory fault? You wish to view the vmkdump file so you can send it to vmware. Who analyse your dumps Where would you find your dump? /root The 100MG partition of vmkdump stores the contents of RAM, this gets converted and copy to the root users home directory

69. Someone has change the password of ROOT on the ESX server
and then left the organisation. How would regain control? Boot from a Redhat CD 7.2 and upwards Use the Rescue command/option Use chkroot/sysimage to again access to the system Use passwd to reset roots password Allow the CD-ROM to reboot the server or easier still At the lilo prompt, type esx 1 (for user single instance of the console) At the prompt, type passwd and correct the password Type EXIT and system will continue to boot the VM Kernel

70. What is vmware-mks when you see it listed with pf ef?

Its the virtual mouse, keyboard and screen The KVM or VNC style redirection that the Remote Console offers

71. What files contains the IP address & subnet mask of the Service
Console /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ipcfg.eth0

72. What file contains the hostname and the Default Gateway?
/etc/sysconfig/network

73. What file contains your DNS settings for name resolution to DNS
servers /etc/resolv.conf

74. What file sets the driver and link speed of the Service Console
NIC? /etc/modules.conf

75. You need to change the boot loader for the Service Console. What
is the boot loader and how is it configured? LILO You edit /etc/lilo.conf Recompile it to a binary file with lilo c v /etc/lilo.conf

76. Which start-up scripts control:

Service Console Networking? System Logging? Secure Shell s10network s12syslog s55sshd

77. Which start-up scripts is responsible amongst others for loading

the vmkloader which in turn loads the VM Kernel s11vmware

78. Which start-up scripts starts the MUI?

s91httpd.vmware

79. Which file maps the PCI device name to the VM Kernel driver for
that device? vmware-devices.map

80. What is the term used to describe the fact that VMs hard drive
and therefore all its files are is just contained in a file encapsulation

81. What are some of the advantages of GSX over ESX

Maximum device compatibility, because it an application that installs itself to an existing OS like Windows or Linux, Lower Pricing Easier installation Supports a great range of guest OSs

82. How does the installation differ between ESX and other
virtualisation products? ESX installs on to bare metal and is an OS in its own right. GSX/WS are applications which install into existing OSs such as Windows and Linux

i.

What are some of the advantages of ESX over GSX Support for SMP

Dynamic Resource allocation using shares and % limits

83. What is Vmwares term for the BIOs?

They call it the monitor it presents physical hardware to the Guest OS

84. What hardware components are available in Workstation/GSX but

NOT available in ESX? Sound Cards USB

85. How much memory is used wasted by Uni-processor VM, and

how much by multi-processor VM? 54MG for Uni 64MG for Dual

86. What is the recommended size for the Service Console swap
partition? 2 x Memory Allocated to the Service Console e.g. 2 x 192mg

87. You wish to backup a VM its data is changing constantly and

involves a large amount of disk space. What is the best backup strategy? Standard Normal, Incremental/Differential backups using a proprietary backup agent within the Guest OS as you would with a physical machine

88. How many physical CPUs does a single-CPU VM run on at any one
time? Just one, with it being scheduled to run on less busy physical CPUs every 10 Milliseconds

89. How many physical CPUs does a dual-CPU VM run on at any one
time? Two physical CPUs, with it being scheduled to run on less busy physical CPUs every 20 milliseconds

90. Do CPU instructions in virtual machines execute on physical or

software simulated CPUs? Bit of a trick question. Its up to you whether you assign one or two CPUs which gives the impression of virtualisation. If you have the vCenter client various dialog boxes make reference to

Virtual CPUs. In fact CPU instructions execute at a physical level. If you look at the System Properties applet and the General tab. You will see the TRUE name of processor and family listed not a virtual device like VMware CPU This is why vMotion has a limitation that the process family must match on both ESX hosts when you migrate one VM to another ESX server.

91. Apart from RAM which two other physical resources used by
Service Console can you control from the MUI? Disk (1000) and CPU shares (1000, 8%)

92. Which file sets the service console run-level, and where is it
located? /etc/inittab and the entry called id:3:initdefault:

93. Where the VM Kernel device drivers located?

/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod

94. s90ware starts the vmkdump process what does the vmkdump
process do? It saves any prior VMkernel dump from the VMkernel dump partition

95. What is the name and location of the configuration file for the
MUI? /usr/lib/vmware-mui/apache/conf/httpd.conf

96. What is the name and location of the configuration file that stores
a users name, password, userID, groupID and so on /etc/passwd

97. Users password are encrypted, what method is used and where is
are the keys stored? /etc/shadow

98. What is the command to recompile the lilo.conf file, and where is
the utility located? lilo c v and the utility is located in /sbin/

99. Which file maps the virtual switch names to the physical devices?
/etc/vmware/netmap.conf

100. Which file lists the NIC Teams?

/etc/vmware/hwconfig

101. How do you list the drivers in use in by the VM Kernel and the
drivers used by the Service Console vmkload_mod list for the VM Kernel lsmod for the Service Console

102. By default ESX can scan to find LUNs that are not contigious
what is the name of the option in advance settings switches this on and off Disk.SupportSparseLUN

103. Allow your SAN most likely only show the appropriate LUNs to
selected servers (called Selective Presentation in HP/Compaq systems) you can hide LUNs at a software level in Advanced Settings. What is the name of this value and how does it work? Disk.MaskLUNs, for example: vmhba0:0:4,6-255 would show LUNs 0-4, hide 5, and show LUNs 6-255

104. You can control HBA bindings and multipath settings from the
Service Console what are the names of these commands/scripts are these? There is a perl script called pbind.pl and the command vmkmultipath with switches -q to query -p to set the policy -r to set the preferred path -e to enable a path -d to disable a path

105. Sometimes you can have network latency issues with Remote
Console, which results in keystrokes being repeated over and over again. How can you stop this?

Add keyboard.typematicMinDelay = 2000000 to the VMX file. This adds a 2second delay to the Remote Console

106. You might have problems with making sure the Service Console
has enough resources to function smoothly because there maybe contention between it and the VMs. What could you do reduce this? Stop VMs from using CPU0 which is also used by the Service Console Ensure there is plenty of RAM assigned to the Service Console, to

reduce any swap activity Avoid sharing storage adapters between the Service Console and VMKernel this reduces I/O contention

107. What is the best mix of VMs for good resource consumption?
Vmware recommend having a having a mix of different limiting resources among the VMs in an ESX server. So 4 VMs that were in turn memory, disk, cpu, network intensive would give best utilization with contention minimized

108. In what scenarios would you switch off modify the automatic
optimization of the workload on the ESX server? If VMs are CPU bound and RAM is plentiful, turn off page sharing If CPU workload is static, then reduce the frequency that system checks for the least busy CPU, and moves processes If VMs memory needs are bursty, decrease idle memory tax rate (the aggressiveness of the balloon driver)

109. What values would change for this, and where would you change
them? ShareScanTotal ShareScanVM would be set to 0 MigratePeriod would set to a higher value IdleTax would be set to a higher value You would change these in the MUI, under Options, Advanced Settings

110. When looking at the Passive Node in MSCS system you see in the
event log, the error The driver detected a controller error in \Device\Scsi\Buslogic3. Is the significant or not? No, its a known issue and can be safely ignored

111. You discover the Remote Console is responding poorly, and the
MUI is responding slowly. Why might this be? Insufficient RAM allocated to the Service Console

112. Process are are being terminated randomly, especially in the MUI
and your having trouble starting new VMs. Why might this be? Insufficient or overly utilized Service Console swap

113. You cannot launch the MUI and you notices that the some of the
logs are missing information. Why might this be?

Lack of disk space, and full file systems

114. When a virtual machine crashes where does it monitor core

dump get created? Its created in the home directory of the owner

115. You need to run the Vmware ESX Server Support Script where
is it located, and where does it create files it is called /usr/bin/vm-support and its creates a file called esx-YEAR-MONTH-DATE.tgz Where ever you are in the command-line it is not normally a very large file Attach to an email and send to vmware support services

116. Purple screens of death are normally caused by what?

Problems with hardware Usually memory with bad blocks But can also caused by environmental problems like cooling or detached external devices

117. You cant start a VM list as many possible reasons

wrong permissions or ownership address for switches or labels or vmhba values might be incorrect Not enough unreserved RAM Not enough unreserved VM Kernel Swap No IP has been set on the Service Console Virtual Disks are corrupt or in a COW format

118. What is the name of VMware Tools command-line configuration

tool in a Linux VM, and where is it located? /etc/vmware/vmware-guestd

119. You upgrade a W2K VM from Uni-Processor to Multi-processor

what must you do with the VM now? You need to update the HAL, using guidelines in MS KB article number 237556

120. You decided to downgrade a mulit-processor VM to a uniprocessor VM, is this supported? No, its not supported and can in fact reduce performance

121. After importing a virtual disk from GSX to ESX, you get errors
about the disk why could this be, and what is the fix? Its not uncommon to get drive geometry errors on GSX to ESX imports. You need to use vmkfstools g on the offending disk, and then modify the VMX file to specify the geometry using the scsiN:N.biogeometry entry

122. You go to import a disk to a VMFS partition but the dialog

message you always get when you import a disk in the MUI doesnt appear. Why? There is probably a problem with the source COW disk

123. PXE can be used to boot a VM and to run an install using

RIS/ADS/Redhat PXE or some other installation system. However, one guest is NOT supported in this configuration which guest OS? Windows XP

124. What is the shrink option used for in VMware Tools?

Its used to optimise a monolithic disk in ESX prior to exporting it to GSX/WS

125. What is the purpose of the Service Console, and what is

relationship with the VM Kernel? "The purpose of the VMware service console is to start up and administer your virtual machines. It is a customized version of Linux based on the Red Hat 7.2 distribution. It has been modified so it can be managed by the VMkernel.

126. What is the purpose of the Vmware-device.map.local file, and

what happens to it when you upgrade ESX server? Used to allow VMs access to local hardware for example generic tape tape and media changers. You can put enteries for drivers in the .map.local file and it survives upgrades i.e. it does NOT get over-written when you upgrade ESX

127. You are running VMs on the SAME disk as the Service Console
and performance from the service console is dipping. Apart from moving the VMDKs to another disk what could you do to improve the responsiveness of the Service Console? You could increase the minimum CPU responsiveness for the service console

128. Which VM kernel log file should check periodically? Vmkernel,

vmksummary, vmkwarning? vmkernel is recommended it will have alerts for out of memory

errors and hardware failures.

129. From the command-line which two methods exist to commit the
redo file to a disk? You could use vmware-cmd or vmkfstools m

130. Where do you change the Speed/Duplex settings for the VM

Kernel NICs and the Service Console NICs? MUI for the VM Kernel NICs and modules.conf for the Service Console NIC

131. You notice that performance of Remote Console and the MUI is
low why could this be? Lack of RAM to the Service Console

132. You find that when using the service console processes are
The service console may have run out of swap space

randomly killed and you are unable to start any new VMs Why?

133. You can not launch the MUI and you notice that you log file are
incomplete why? The / drive is full or the disk is flushed is the most likely reason

134. What are the dangers of using excessively using the ROOT
account when it is not required? VMs get created as root, causing ownership problems Increased chance of catastrophic operator error Hard to change the ROOT password, without informing lots of people Audit trails/Change Management is made difficult/impossible Greater chance of two admins carrying out the same task at the same time and creating a conflict or unexpected configuration changes

135. During the installation you find that one of PCI device is not
found. What could you do during the installation to try and remedy this? By default the install uses IOAPIC to allocate interrupts to hardware devices. At the install prompt you can type: esx apic which choose another method for allocating interrupts

136. On start-up the utility vmkdump always runs. What does it do?

It detect that a Purple Screen of Death has occurred, and retrieves the data from the VMK Core Dump partition, and saves as a human readable file in the ROOTs home directory

137. You cannot connect to Remote Console what are possible

reasons? Loss of connectivity Incorrect DNS/IP NIC Duplex/Speed mismatch between eth0 on the Service Console and the physical management switch / file system could be full Someone may have change the default tcp port from 902 to another number

138. Can you tell from ps ef the number of VMs running on a ESX
Server? Bit of tricky question. Ive heard but yes and no from various sources. The OFFICAL answer is no. If you run ps ef grep vmware-vmx this will list all the processes running that have been started using the vmx file. One instance can start multiple instances as can be seen below

Process 1 started, 1343, and 1343 started 1377. Similar Process 1 started 13635, which started 13822, which started 13823. This equates to two VMs running. If shutdown one of the VMs these parent process and child process get terminated HOWEVER, if you have remote console open on a powered down VM it appears as process. As when Remote Console runs it connects to the VMX file. Due to this it is impossible to know from ps ef if the VM is run or not running. However, a running VMX file has a reference to Floppy/CD (even if they are disconnected) whereas a Remote Console session does not so if you counted the number of times you saw the reference to floppy/CD then you would know the number of running virtual machines. I guess the only DEFINITIVE way to find out the power status of a VM is with vmware-cmd getstate and script to check each registered VM like so:

#!/bin/bash for vm in `vmware-cmd -l` do vmware-cmd "$vm" getstate done OR use vm-support x

139. You create 10GB virtual disk which contain 4GB of data. You then
export this to a vmimages (ext3) partition. How many files would have and how much disk space would they consume? They would be about 5/6 files 10GB/2GB gives about 5 plus a metadata file that links all the files together. The actual space consumed would be 4GB in the COW (Copy-On-Write) format

140. How many network cards are supported in ESX?

16 100mb cards, or 8 gigabit cards or 8 dual-port cards