Vmware Interview Questions

Common Interview Questions VMWare L3 Administrator

1. What will be your daily activities in VMWare
2. What is the difference between VMWare and Hyper-V, when do you use one over the other
3. When you encounter PSOD, what steps do you follow
4. What do you do when you encounter “Failed to load, swap file not found” error
5. What port does P2V uses
6. What is the command to format and mount a file system
7. What is dvSwitch and why do you need it
8. What is the command you use for reading vm dump file and where does dump file reside
9. Explain the process you follow for Physical to Virtual conversion
10. What is P2V Cleanup and explain it
11. What do you do when the VC becomes frozen/not responding
12. What is ballooning and explain it
13. What is DRS
14. What is HA and how frequent it checks the hosts connectivity
15. what is AAM (Always Available Manager, Active Alert Manager) and it’s role
16. What is Forged Traffic and what is the default value it’s set to
17. What is Promiscuous mode
18. What is RDM and when do you use it
19. What is ks.conf file
20. How do you expand root/C: drive of a VM
21. What are the features of VMFS
22. How do you restart the services of ESX and vCenter
23. Which port vCenter server listens on or uses
24. What is traffic shaping/filtering/prioritization, NIC teaming
25. Suppose I select  1 mb block size what is the maximum file size I can have?
26. What are Networking Policies
27. What network types available in VMWare?

Common Interview Questions VMWare L2Administrator

1). What's new with vsphere 5.1?
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-what-is-new-vsphere5.pdf

2). Difference between ESX and ESXi?

3). How does vmotion works?

4). Pre-requisites of vMotion?
1.     ESX Servers must be configured with VMkenerl ports enabled for vmotion and on the same network segment
2.     ESX Servers must be managed by the same Virtual Center server
3.     ESX Must have compatible CPUs
4.     ESX Servers must have consistent Networks and Netwroks labels
5.     The VMs must be stored on shared storage - iSCSI or FC SAN or NAS/NFS
6.     The VMs cannot use local cd/floppy or internal only vrtual switches on the ESX server

5). Difference between h/w version 4 vs 7 vs 8 vs 9?
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.upgrade.doc_50%2FGUID-68E5EDAE-66DE-43F8-9420-F424AFEADB1D.html

6). What is storage DRS?
http://www.vmware.com/ap/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/storage-drs.html

7). How is HA of vsphere 4.1 different from vsphere 5.x?
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/vmware-high-availability-deepdiv/

8). What is NMP (native multipathing)?
9). If one host is showing disconected to vcenter, how will you troubleshoot it?
10). What is PSOD, how will you troubleshoot it?
11). Where does the logs of hostd and vpx go?
12). what is in-memory filesystem and is introduced with which version?
13). Pr-requisites of FT?
14). What can be the maxium size of snapshot, how it grows?
15). Commands to create vswitch?
16). What is lockdown mode?
17). what is CPU ready time?
18). How to enable hot-add feature?
19). how to generate logs using CLI?
20). What is the default location for AAM logs?
21). Difference between VMF3 and VMFS5 filesystem?
22). How to troubleshoot VMs performance using CLI?
23). Difference between vpxa and hostd deamons?
24). How many simultaneous vmotions are possible in 1gigs n/w?
25). What are default roles in vcenter?
26). Whati s the difference between vmdk and flat.vmdk?
27). What is "shared nothing" vmotion and its pre-requisites?
28). Licensing model in 5.0 and how it is changed in 5.1?
29). How to upgrade from ESX 3.5 to 4.0 /4.x to 5.x?
30). What is a slot-size and how is it calculated?
31). Importance of VMware tools?
32). How many disk failures does RAID 5 support?
33). which is better RAID 10 or RAID 01


Storage Questions

1). What is zoning, different types of zoning?
2). Difference b/w soft and hard zoning?
3). Whati s LUN masking?
4). What is vault drive?
5). What is LUN masking and how is it different from zoning?
6. How many maximum number of disks can be placed in EMC clariion CX4 - 960
7). What is LCC and its importance?
8). What is difference between contcatination and Striping in lun expansion?
9). How is a LUN presented to a server, all steps like RAID grouping, LUN binding etc?
10). what is WWN and IQN
11). What are different types of backup techniques?
12). What is deduplication?