Vmware Interview Questions:-

1. Transparent Page Sharing (TPS)

When multiple virtual machines are running, some of them may have identical sets of memory
content. This presents opportunities for sharing memory across virtual machines (as well as sharing
within a single virtual machine). For example, several virtual machines may be running the same guest
operating system, have the same applications, or contain the same user data. With page sharing,
the hypervisor can reclaim the redundant copies and only keep one copy, which is shared by multiple
virtual machines in the host physical memory. As a result, the total virtual machine host memory
consumption is reduced and a higher level of memory overcommitment is possible.

2.Ballooning
Ideally, a VM from which memory has been reclaimed should perform as if it had been configured with
less memory. ESX Server uses a ballooning technique to achieve such predictable performance by
coaxing the guest OS into cooperating with it when possible. This process is d1epicted
3.Hypervisor Swapping

Hypervisor Swapping

In the cases where Ballooning (and TPS) are not sufficient to reclaim memory, ESX employs Hypervisor
Swapping to reclaim memory. At guest startup, the hypervisor creates a separate swap file for the
guest. This file located in the guest’s home directory has an extension .vswp

DRS

based on pre-defined rules intelligently allocating available resources among the virtual machines
Optimize hardware utilization automatically

HA
VMware HA ensures that sufficient resources are available in the resource pool at all times to be able
to restart virtual machines on different physical servers in the event of server failure. Restart of virtual
machines is made possible by the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)

VMOTION
1. Entire state of a virtual machine is encapsulated by a set of files stored on shared storage such as
FC,SCSI,NFS
2. Memory and system state, Execution State will be transferred/copy the BITMAP to VM
instantaneously from running ESX to another ESX
3. Networks being used by the virtual machine are also virtualized by the underlying ESX host
VMotion manages the virtual MAC address as part of the process. Once the destination machine is
activated, VMotion pings the network router to ensure that it is aware of the new physical location of
the virtual MAC address

SVMOTION
live migration of virtual machine disk files within and across storage arrays with no downtime or
disruption in service. Storage VMotion relocates virtual machine disk files from one shared storage
location to
another shared storage location with zero downtime,

Port Groups
1.Virtual Machine(Used for VM network)
2.Service Console(Used for Service Console Communications)
3.Vm Kernel(Used for VMotion, iSCSI, NFS Communications)

What are the files that make VM?

File.VMX,.File.NVRAM.,.File.VSWAP,File.vmfx,.File.vmsd,snapshot database.vmsn,VMBOIS.vmdk,Virtual
machine diskfile.vswp,Vm snapshot file.vmss,etc.

VM High Availability Fault Tolerance

Automatic creation of secondary virtual machines. Automatically trigger the
creation of a new secondary virtual machine after failover, to ensure continuous
protection to the application
additional dedicated gigabit Ethernet network

What are the different types of Virtualization?

Server,Storage,application,Presentation,Hardware,Network.

VCB
VMware Consolidate Backup is used as mediator between the backup software and
Virtual machines / ESX hosts.

What is a VNIC?

A VNIC is a virtual nic which is added when we create a virtual machine. Its a software based nic
(virtualized nic) which enables the communication between vm’s or between a vm or vSwitch

vSwitch?

A vSwitch is nothing but the physical nic which is installed on the ESX server. The same physical
nic shared to all the virtual machines hosted on that particular ESX server. So it is acting as a
Switch in this scenario. We can connect/configure 1016 virtual machines to use a physical nic, in
other words we can create a virtual switch that contain 1016 ports. No physical switch provides
these many ports in real time. And in other case, we can create the vSwitch with out any physical
nic also. Its purely software based vSwitch (the same is used between VM1 and VM2).

Unable to power on the Virtual Machine, How to fix it?

If the virtual machine is running in a cluster of esx hosts, some times it won’t power on. Why
because, the files that are associated with that VM are locked by the host at the time of running. So
when you try to vmotion the vm from one host to another host, the first host releases those files
and again locked by the second host.

So what is meant by locking here, and why it is happening?

Locking is nothing but, the registration of a vm with a host. this happens everytime when the vm is
hosted on a host. this is helpful to prevent the access to the same vm for remaining hosts in the
cluster.

Why the vm fails when trying to power it on?

When the files associated with that VM are locked by a host it won’t powered on. At that time, you
must unregister the vm from the host using vmware-cmd utilit

How to fix HA errors in VMware ESX Server?

1. Make sure all the hosts in the cluster are able to resolve each other by host name.

2. If they were not able to do so, check the DNS settings.

3. Best solution is to add all the hosts names and ip addresses into
/etc/hosts file on all ESX servers in the cluster. Put the ESX server in
maintenance mode before doing any changes.

4. Exit from the maintenance mode and try to reconfigure the HA on all
the ESX hosts one by one, that's it your problem will be fixe

Host Profiles. Using Host Profiles we can create a baseline profile image of one ESX
Server and applying it to the remaining hosts in the Cluster. With that the
configuration of all the ESX hosts looks similar like mirror images. Before taking the
baseline from the first ESX server, we have to make sure all the configuration is
accurate to avoid problems in the future

RDM (Raw Device Mappings) : Generally when we create a Virtual Machine we will
create/allocate some space to the .vmdk file which is used as the internal hard disk
for the Virtual Machine. We can create/allocate space for .vmdk file from the above 3
storage types. But those cannot be directly accessed by the Virtual Machine. First ESX
server accesses it and it passes that access to the Virtual Machine. But using RDM we
can give direct access to the Virtual Machine to the above said storages. But one
disadvantage of RDM is we cannot take snapshots if we configure it as Physical.

What happens when you take a snapshot of virtual machine?

When you take a snapshot of virtual machine, it makes a copy of the .vmdk file and its memory,
saves them along with the other virtual machine files.

"vmware-cmd createsnapshot "

each snapshot occupies the same size of .vmdk file in the datastore. So if you take
more snapshots, more space will be utilized.

Distributed vSwitch (VIDEO)

This is an extra-ordinary feature of vSphere 4.0, which saves lot of administrative time in
configuring networking on each and every single ESX server in a cluster individually. With this
ultimate feature we can configure a dvSwitch at the cluster level, which is applied to all the hosts.
So that the network configuration on all hosts remains identical which avoids network related
issues while doing vMotion like things.