Top 80 VMware Interview Questions & Answers 2021

By Nisar Ahmad | July 25, 2021

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VMware is the leader in Virtualization and Cloud Computing technologies and also providing
solutions in the field of network and desktop virtualization. VMware has changed the tech world
from a physical to a software-based virtual world.

Due to the implementation of a virtual environment to consolidate the available hardware, the
demands of subject matter experts are increasing day by day in the market. To manage and
maintain an organization’s business, an experienced workforce is required, and to choose the top
talent from the market for growing an organization’s business, professionals are selected via
many technical interviews and HR processes.

Along with the HR processes, technical interviews are also conducted to assess the abilities of a
professional in the field of virtualization for continuous business processes. Here are 80
interview questions on data center virtualization technology fresher and up to 3 years of hands-
on experience that may be asked to assess the candidate’s technical and hands-on expertise.

If you’re interested in vSphere 6.5 certification, Pass the VMware vSphere 6.5 Foundations exam
– PRACTICE TEST  will help you to pass the exam. If you want to learn more about VMware
vSphere, complete guidance regarding vSphere 7.0 installation, configuration, and management,
you can follow the Clear and Simple VMware vSphere 7 Professional VCP 2V0-21.20  Course.
And, if you are interested in building your own home lab to hands-on VMware vSphere 7, you
can purchase HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 1U RackMount 64-bit Server with 2×6-Core E5-2640
Xeon 2.5GHz CPUs + 64GB PC3-10600R RAM + 8×300GB 10K SAS SFF HDD, P420i RAID,
4×GigaBit NIC, 2×Power Supplies, NO OS (Renewed) server and build a nested lab. VMware
also announced VCP-DCV for vSphere 7.x (Exam 2V0-21.20) Official Cert Guide (VMware
Press Certification) that will help you to learn and earn VCP-DCV 2021 certification.

These interview questions are categorized into the following technical areas:
  Hypervisor
 Fault Tolerance (FT)
 Virtual Networking
 vCenter Server
 Virtual Storage (Datastore)
 What’s New in vSphere 6.0
 Content Libraries
 vSAN
 vApp and
 Miscellaneous

VMware Hypervisor Interview Questions

1. What is VMKernel and why it is important?

VMkernel is a virtualization interface between a Virtual Machine and the ESXi host which stores
VMs. It is responsible to allocate all available resources of the ESXi host to VMs such as
memory, CPU, storage, etc. It’s also controlled special services such as vMotion, Fault tolerance,
NFS, traffic management, and iSCSI. To access these services, the VMkernel port can be
configured on the ESXi server using a standard or distributed vSwitch. Without VMkernel,
hosted VMs cannot communicate with the ESXi server.

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2. What are the hypervisor and their types?

A hypervisor is a virtualization layer that enables multiple operating systems to share a single
hardware host.  Each operating system or VM is allocated physical resources such as memory,
CPU, storage, etc by the host. There are two types of hypervisors

 Hosted hypervisor (works as application i-e VMware Workstation)

 Bare-metal (is virtualization software i-e VMvisor, Hyper-V which is installed directly
onto the hardware and controls all physical resources).
 3. What is Virtualization?

The process of creating virtual versions of physical components i-e Servers, Storage Devices,
Network Devices on a physical host is called virtualization. Virtualization lets you run multiple
virtual machines on a single physical machine which is called ESXi host.

4. What are the different types of virtualization?

There are 5 basic types of virtualization

 Server virtualization: consolidates the physical server and multiple OS can be run on a
single server.
 Network Virtualization: Provides complete reproduction of physical network into a
software-defined network.
 Storage Virtualization: Provides an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to
manage and optimize virtual deployment.
 Application Virtualization: increased mobility of applications and allows migration of
VMs from a host on another with minimal downtime.
 Desktop Virtualization: virtualize desktop to reduce cost and increase service

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) Interview Questions

5. What is VMware FT?

FT stands for Fault Tolerance very prominent component of VMware vSphere. It provides
continuous availability for VMs when an ESXi host fails. It supports up to 4 vCPUs and 64 GB
memory. FT is very bandwidth-intensive and 10GB NIC is recommended to configure it. It
creates a complete copy of an entire VM such as storage, compute, and memory.

6. How many vCPUs can be used for a VM in FT in VMware vSphere 7.0?

In VMware vSphere 7.0, there can be up to 8 vCPUs with the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus
license.
 7. What is the name of the technology used by VMware FT?

vLockstep technology is used by VMware FT

8. What is Fault Tolerant Logging?

The communication between two ESXi hosts is called FT logging when FT is configured
between them. The pre-requisition of configuring FT is to configure the VMKernel port.

9. Will the FT work if the vCenter Server goes down?

vCenter Server is only required to enable Fault Tolerance on a VM. Once it is configured,
vCenter is not required to be online for FT to work. FT failover between primary and
secondary will occur even if the vCenter is down.
10. What is the main difference between VMware HA and FT?

The main difference between VMware HA and FT is: HA is enabled per cluster and VMware FT
is enabled per VM. In HA, VMs will be re-started and powered-on on another host in case of a
host failure, while in FT there is no downtime because the second copy will be activated in case
of host failure.

Virtual Networking Interview Questions

11. What is virtual networking?

A network of VMs running on a physical server that is connected logically with each other is
called virtual networking.

12. What is vSS?

vSS stands for Virtual Standard Switch is responsible for the communication of VMs hosted on a
single physical host. it works like a physical switch that automatically detects a VM which wants
to communicate with another VM on the same physical server.

13. What is vDS?

vDS stands for Virtual Distributed Switch acts as a single switch in a whole virtual environment
and is responsible to provide central provisioning, administration, and monitoring of the virtual
network.

14. How many maximum standard ports per host are available?

4096 ports per host are available either in a standard switch or distributed switch.

15. What are the main benefits of distributed switch (vDS)?

vDS can provide:

 The central administration for a virtual data center

 Central provision, and
 Monitoring

16. What is the VMKernal adapter and why is it used?

VMKernel adapter provides network connectivity to the ESXi host to handle network traffic for
vMotion, IP Storage, NAS, Fault Tolerance, and vSAN. For each type of traffic such as vMotion,
vSAN, etc. separate VMKernal adapter should be created and configured.

17. What is the main use of port groups in data center virtualization?

You can segregate the network traffic by using port groups such as vMotion, FT, management
traffic, etc.

18. What are the three port groups are configured in ESXi networking?

 Virtual Machine Port Group – Used for Virtual Machine Network

 Service Console Port Group – Used for Service Console Communications
 VMKernel Port Group – Used for VMotion, iSCSI, NFS Communications

19. What is VLAN and why use in virtual networking?

A logical configuration on the switch port to segment the IP Traffic where each segment cannot
communicate with other segments without proper rules mentioned is called VLAN and every
VLAN has a proper number called VLAN ID.

20. What is VLAN Tagging?

The practice of inserting VLAN ID into a packet header to identify which VLAN packet belongs
to is called VLAN tagging.

21. What are the three network security policies/modes on vSwitch?

 Promiscuous mode
 MAC address change
 Forged transmits

22. What is the promiscuous mode on vSwitch?

Promiscuous mode is a security policy that can be defined at the virtual switch or portgroup level
in vSphere ESX/ESXi. A virtual machine, Service Console, or VMkernel network interface in a
portgroup that allows the use of promiscuous mode can see all network traffic traversing the
virtual switch.

By default, a guest operating system’s virtual network adapter only receives frames that are
meant for it. Placing the guest’s network adapter in promiscuous mode causes it to receive all
frames passed on the virtual switch that are allowed under the VLAN policy for the associated
portgroup. This can be useful for intrusion detection monitoring or if a sniffer needs to analyze
all traffic on the network segment.

23. What is MAC address changes network policy?

The security policy of a virtual switch includes a MAC address change option. This option
affects traffic that a virtual machine receives.
When the Mac address changes option is set to Accept, ESXi accepts requests to change the
effective MAC address to a different address than the initial MAC address.

When the Mac address changes option is set to Reject, ESXi does not honor requests to change
the effective MAC address to a different address than the initial MAC address. This setting
protects the host against MAC impersonation.

24. What is Forged transmits network policy?

The Forged transmits option affects traffic that is transmitted from a virtual machine.

When the Forged transmits option is set to Accept, ESXi does not compare source and effective
MAC addresses.

VMware vCenter Server Interview Questions

25. What are the main components of vCenter Server architecture?

vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for management, operation, resource

provisioning, and performance evaluation of virtual machines and hosts.

When you deploy the vCenter Server Appliance, vCenter Server, the vCenter

Server components, and the authentication services are deployed on the same system.

The following components are included in the vCenter Server appliance deployments:

 The authentication services contain vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, Lookup
Service, and VMware Certificate Authority.
 The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Client, vSphere
Auto Deploy, and vSphere ESXi Dump Collector. The vCenter Server appliance also
contains the VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager Extension service and the VMware
vCenter Lifecycle Manager.

26. What are PSC and its components?

PSC stands for Platform Services Controller first introduced in version 6 of VMware vSphere
which handles infrastructure security functions. It has three main components.

 Single Sign-On (SSO)

 VMware Certificate Authority (CA)
 Licensing service

27. What are the two main deploying methods of PSC

You can install PSC in VMware vSphere 6.7 in two ways:

 Embedded
 External

But, in VMware vSphere 7.0, we can install PSC only in Embedded mode, External PSC
deployment has been deprecated in VMware vSphere 7.0 or onwards.

28. What are the different types of vCenter Server deployment?

It has two deployment types till VMware vSphere 6.7.

 Embedded Deployment
 External deployment

In VMware vSphere 7.0 and onwards, External PSC has been deprecated. We can only install
PSC in Embedded mode.

29. What is vRealize Operation (vROP)

vROP provides the operation dashboards for performance analytics, capacity optimization, and
monitoring the virtual environment.

30. What is vCloud Suite?

vCloud Suite combines multiple VMware components to give a complete set of cloud
infrastructure capabilities in a single package, including virtualization, software-defined
datacenter services, disaster recovery, application management, etc.

31. What is the basic security step to secure vCenter Server and users?

Authenticate vCenter Server with Active Directory. By using this we can assign specific roles to
users and can also manage the virtual environment in an efficient way.

Virtual Storage (Datastore) Interview Questions

What is a datastore?

A datastore is a storage location where virtual machine files are stored and accessed. Datastore is
based on a file system which is called VMFS, NFS.

32. What is the .vmx file?

It is the configuration file of a VM

33. What information .nvram file store?

It stores BIOS-related information of a VM.

34. What .vmdk file do and used?

vmdk is a VM disk file and stores data of a VM. It can be up to 62 TB in size in the vSphere 5.5
and onward versions.

35. How many disk types are in VMware?

There are three disk types in vSphere.

1. Thick Provisioned Lazy Zeroes: every virtual disk is created by default in this disk
format. Physical space is allocated to a VM when a virtual disk is created. It can’t be
converted to thin disk.
 2. Thick Provision Eager Zeroes: this disk type is used in VMware Fault Tolerance. All
required disk space is allocated to a VM at the time of creation. It takes more time to
create a virtual disk compare to other disk formats.
3. Thin provision: It provides an on-demand allocation of disk space to a VM. When data
size grows, the size of a disk will grow. Storage capacity utilization can be up to 100%
with thin provisioning.

36. What is Storage vMotion?

It is similar to traditional vMotion, in Storage vMotion, a virtual disk of a VM is moved from

datastore to another. During Storage vMotion, virtual disk types think provisioning disk can be
transformed to thin provisioned disk.

What’s New in vSphere 6.0

37. What is VM Hardware version for vSphere 6.0?

Version 11

38. What VM hardware version for vSphere 6.5?

Version 13

39. What VM Hardware version for vSphere 6.7 and vSphere 7.0?

Version 14 for ESXi 6.7, Version 15 for ESXi 6.7 U2, Version 17 for ESXi 7.0, Version 18 for
ESXi 7.0 U1, and Version 19 for ESXi 7.0 U2

40. In which version of vSphere PSC was introduced?

Platform Services Controller (PSC) is introduced in vSphere 6.0. vSphere 6.0 is also known as
Virtual hardware version 11.
41. How many maximum hosts can manage a vCenter Server in vSphere 6.0?

In vSphere 6.0, a single vCenter Server can manage up to 1000 hosts either in Windows or in
vCenter Appliance (vCSA). In vSphere 6.5 and 6.7, 2000 hosts, and in vSphere 7.0, 2500 can be
managed by a single vCenter Server.

42. How many hosts can be managed by a cluster in vSphere 6.0?

A single cluster can manage maximum 64 hosts in VMware vSphere 6.0 and onward versions.

43. How can maximum VMs be managed by a single cluster?

A single cluster can manage the maximum of 8000 VMs.

44. What is VVol?

Virtual Volume a new VM disk management concept introduced in vSphere 6.0 that enables
array-based operations at the virtual disk level. VVol is automatically created when a virtual disk
is created in a virtual environment for a VM.

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45. How many licensing options for vSphere 6.0?

There are three licensing options for vSphere 6.0:

 Standard Edition: Contains 1 vCenter Server Standard license, up to 2 vCPUs for Fault
Tolerance, vMotion, Storage vMotion, HA, VVols etc.
 Enterprise Edition: Same as Standard Edition additionally APIs for Array Integration and
Multipathing, DRS, and DPM.
 Enterprise Plus: Includes all features of Standard and Enterprise Editions with
additionally Fault Tolerance upto 4 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM. It also includes
Distributed vSwitch and the most expensive licensing option of vSphere 6.0.

46. How much Maximum RAM can support vSphere 6.0?

It supports upto 12TB of RAM per host in vSphere 6.0 and vSphere 6.5, and 16TB of RAM per
host in VMware vSphere 6.7 and 7.0.

Content Libraries Interview Questions

47. What is the Content Library?

Content Library is the central location point between two different geographical locations with
vCenter Servers where you can store VM templates, ISO images, scripts etc. and share them
between geographical locations

48. What are the main benefits of content libraries?

We create VM templates and can share on another geographical location of a company without
creating again on other locations. It has many benefits such as sharing and consistency, storage
efficiency, and secure subscription.

49. How many types of Content Libraries have?

It has three types:

1. Local: library of local control.

2. Published: local library which contents (VM templates, ISO images etc) for subscription.
3. Subscribed: A library which syncs with the published library
4. What are the requirements and limitations of Content Libraries?

A content library has the following requirements and limitations

 Single storage which can size upto 64TB

 Maximum of 256 items per library
 Sync occurs once every 24 hours

50. What is VMFS?

VMFS is a file system for a VM in VMware vSphere. VMFS is a datastore that responsible for
storing virtual machine files. VMFS can also store large files which size can up to 64TB in
vSphere 6.0. In latest versions of VMware vSphere, VMFS 6 is used to store VMs.

VSAN Interview Questions

51. What is vSAN?

Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage first introduced in vSphere 5.5 and is fully integrated
with vSphere. It aggregates locally attached storage of ESXi hosts which are part of a cluster and
creates a distributed shared solution.

52. What is cold migration?

To move a powered-off VM from one host to another is called cold migration.

53. What is Storage vMotion?

To move a powered-on VM from one datastore to another is called Storage vMotion.

54. What are the different configuration options for VSAN?

There are two configuration options for  vSAN:

 Hybrid: Uses both flash-based and magnetic disks for storage. Flash are used for cashing,
while magnetic disks are used for capacity or storage.
 All-Flash: Uses flash for both caching and for storage

55. Are there VSAN ready nodes are available in the market?

Yes, vSAN-ready such as VxRail 4.0 and 4.5 are available in the market. VxRail is the
combination of min 3 servers which are part of a cluster and can scale up to 64 servers.

56. How minimum servers/hosts are required to configure vSAN?

To configure a vSAN, you should have minimum 3 ESXi hosts/servers in the form of a vSAN
cluster. If one of the servers fails, a vSAN cluster will fail.

57. How are many maximum ESXi hosts allowed for vSAN?

64 hosts are max allowed to configure a vSAN cluster.

58. How many disk groups and max magnetic disks are allowed in single disk group?

Maximum 5 disk groups are allowed on an ESXi host which is a part of a vSAN cluster and a
maximum of 7 magnetic and 1 SSD per disk group is allowed.

59. How many types of storages can we use in our virtual environment?

 Direct Attached Storage

 Fiber Channel (FC)
 iSCSI
 Network Attached Storage (NAS)

60. What is NFS?

Network File System (NFS) is a file sharing protocol that ESXi hosts use to communicate with a
NAS device. NAS is a specialized storage device that connects to a network and can provide file
access services to ESXi hosts.

61. What is Raw Device Mapping (RDM)?

Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is a file stored in a VMFS volume that acts as a proxy for a raw
physical device. RDM enables you to store virtual machine data directly on a LUN. RDM is
recommended when a VM must interact with a real disk on the SAN.

62. What is iSCSI storage?

An iSCSI SAN consists of an iSCSI storage system, which contains one or more storage
processors. TCP/IP protocol is used to communicate between host and storage array. an iSCSI
initiator is configured with the ESXi host. an iSCSI initiator can be a hardware-based either
dependent or independent and software-based known as iSCSI software initiator.

63. What is the format of iSCSI addressing?

It uses TCP/IP to configure.

64. What are iSCSI naming conventions?

iSCSI names are formatted in two different ways:

 the iSCSI qualified name (IQN)

 extended unique identifier (EUI)

vApp Interview Questions

65. What is vApp?

vApp is a container or group where more than one VM can be package and manage multi-tiered
applications for specific requirements for example, Web server, database server, and application
server can be configured as a vApp and can be defined their power-on and power-off sequence.

66. What settings can be configured for vApp?

We can configure several settings for vApp such as CPU and memory allocation, and IP
allocation policy etc.

Miscellaneous Interview Questions

67. What is VMware Tanzu?

VMware Tanzu is the suite or portfolio of products and solutions that allow its customers to
Build, Run, and Manage Kubernetes controlled container-based applications. This technology is
introduced in VMware vSphere 7.0.

68. What is VMware DRS?

DRS stands for Distributed Resource Scheduler; which automatically balances available
resources among various hosts by using cluster or resource pools. With the help of HA, DRS can
move VMs from one host to another to balance the available resources among VMs.

69. What are share, limit, and reservation?

Share: A value that specifies the relative priority or importance of a VM access to given
resource.

Limit: Consumption of a CPU cycle or host physical memory that cannot cross the defined value
(limit).

Reservation: This value defines in the form of CPU or memory and must be available for a VM
to start.

70. What are the alarms why we use them?

An alarm is a notification which appears when an event occurs. Many default alarms exist for
many inventory objects. Alarms can be created and modified using vSphere Web Client;

71. What are the hot-pluggable devices that can be added while VM is running?

We can add HDDs and NIC while VM is running.

72. What is a Template?

When a VM is converted into a format which can be used to create a VM with pre-defined
settings is called a template. An installed VM can be converted into a template but it cannot be
powered on.

73. What is Snapshot?

To create a copy of a VM with the timestamp as a restore point is called a snapshot. Snapshots
are taken when an upgrade or software installation is required. For better performance, a
snapshot should be removed after a particular task is performed.
 <br />       <br />      <br />      <br />

74. How to convert a physical machine into a VM?

Three steps are required to convert a physical machine to a VM:

 An agent needs to be installed on the Physical machine

 VI client needs to be installed with Converter Plug-in
 A server to import/export virtual machines

75. What is vMotion and what is the main purpose to use it in a virtual environment?

It is a very prominent feature of VMware vSphere used to live migrate running VMs from one
ESXi host to another without any downtime. Datastores and ESXi hosts both can be used while
vMotion.

76. What is the difference between a clone and a template?

A clone is a copy of a virtual machine. By cloning a VM, it will save time if multiple VMs with
the same configurations are required to configure. While a template is a master copy of an image
created from a VM which can be later used to create many clones. After converting a VM to a
template, it can’t be powered-on or edited.

77. What monitoring method is used in vSphere HA?

 Network Heartbeat
 Datastore Heartbeat

78. How is master host elected in vSphere HA?

When HA is enabled in a cluster, all hosts take part in a selection process to be selected as a
master host. A host which has the highest number of datastores mounted will be selected as a
master host. All other hosts will remain slave hosts.

79. What is the purpose of VMware Tools?

It is a suite of utilities that are used to enhance the performance of a VM in the form of graphics,
mouse/keyboard movement, network card, and other peripheral devices.

80.What is VMware DPM?

Stands for Distributed Power Management is a feature of VMware DRS is used to monitor
required resources in a cluster. When the resources are decreases due to low usage, VMware
DPM consolidates workloads and shut down the hosts which are not being used, and when
resources are increased it automatically power on the un-used hosts.

81. What is the ESXi Shell?

It is a command-line interface is used to run repair and diagnostics of ESXi hosts. It can be
accessed via DCUI, vCenter Server enable/disable, and via SSH.

82. How to run ESXTOP on ESXi host?

To run ESXTOP on an ESXi host, we’ll need two pre-requisites:

 Install vSphere Client on a host where you want to configure

 Enable SSH from DCUI by using the “Troubleshooting Options” link

83. What is VMware vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode and How It Works?

VMware vCenter Server Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) is one of the vSphere advanced features
that allows connecting multiple vCenter Servers to provide a single interface where you can
view, search, and manage permissions, replications of roles, policies, and licenses between
multiple vCenter Servers.

It allows you to simplify enterprise virtual environments deployed in the same or multiple sites
with multiple vCenter Server while deploying vCenter Server as VCSA or Windows Servers.

If you’re interested in vSphere 6.5 certification, Pass the VMware vSphere 6.5 Foundations exam
– PRACTICE TEST  will help you to pass the exam. If you want to learn more about VMware
vSphere, complete guidance regarding vSphere 7.0 installation, configuration, and management,
you can follow the Clear and Simple VMware vSphere 7 Professional VCP 2V0-21.20  Course.
And, if you are interested in building your own home lab to hands-on VMware vSphere 7, you
can purchase HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 1U RackMount 64-bit Server with 2×6-Core E5-2640
Xeon 2.5GHz CPUs + 64GB PC3-10600R RAM + 8×300GB 10K SAS SFF HDD, P420i RAID,
4×GigaBit NIC, 2×Power Supplies, NO OS (Renewed) server and build a nested lab. VMware
also announced VCP-DCV for vSphere 7.x (Exam 2V0-21.20) Official Cert Guide (VMware
Press Certification) that will help you to learn and earn VCP-DCV 2021 certification.

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