Mastering Virtualization 6.0

Identify the layers in which HA can be applied

-Application Layer -Operating System Layer -Virtualization Layer -Physical Layer

Identify storage types supported on ESXI hosts

-Local SAS/SATA/SCSI storage -Fibre Channel -Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) -iSCSI using software and hardware -initiators -NAS (specifically, NFS) -InfiniBand

Understand how vSwitches connect and Function

A software-based switch that resides in the VMkernel and provides traffic management for VMs. Users must manage vSphere Standard Switches independently on each ESXi host. In this book, the term vSwitch refers to both a vSphere Standard Switch as well as a virtual switch in general. Requires ports or port groups and uplinks for any communications external to the host. Without uplinks, a virtual switch can't communicate with the upstream network; without ports or port groups, a vSwitch can't provide connectivity for the VMkernel or the VMs. Virtual switches provide the connectivity to provide communication as follows: Between VMs within an ESXi host Between VMs on different ESXi hosts Between VMs and other virtual or physical network identities connected via the physical network For VMkernel access to networks for vMotion, iSCSI, NFS, Virtual SAN, provisioning, vSphere Replication, or fault tolerance logging (and management on ESXi)

Describe Features in VSPHERE 6

A suite of products that include ESXi, vCenter, VUM, Orchestrator. Also includes features that include Virtual SMP, vMotion, DRS, Storage and Network I/O Control, Policy-Based Storage, High Availability and Fault Tolerance

Understand the fundamental but subtle difference that exists between allocation and utilization.

Allocation - how much of a resource has been designated for use. utilization - how effective a resource is being used.

Understand AAA

Authentication - properly identified as who they claim to be. Authorization - enabled or permitted to perform a task, which also includes network access controls. Accounting - all actions are tracked and logged for future reference.

Understand VSPHERE Autodeploy along with Stateful Installs

Auto Deploy - required VCenter host profiles, persistent or non-persistent Stateful Install, is similar to Stateless Caching except the server's boot order is reversed: local disk first and network second. Unless the server is specifically told to network boot again, the Auto Deploy service is no longer needed. This mode is effectively just a mechanism for network installation.

Understand VUM baselines

Baselines are further subdivided into patch baselines, upgrade baselines, and host extension baselines. Patch baselines define lists of patches to be applied to an ESX/ESXi host; upgrade baselines define how to upgrade an ESX/ESXi host, the VM's hardware, VMware Tools, or a virtual appliance. There's also another type of baseline for hosts, known as host extension baselines; these are used to manage the extensions installed onto your ESX/ESXi hosts. VMware provides a few baselines with VUM when it's installed. The following baselines are present upon installation: Two dynamic host patch baselines named Critical Host Patches and Non- Critical Host Patches A dynamic baseline for upgrading VMware Tools to match the host A dynamic baseline for upgrading VM hardware to match the host A dynamic VA upgrade baseline named VA Upgrade To Latest

Understand CPU affinity

CPU affinity allows you to statically associate a VM to a specific physical CPU core. CPU affinity is generally not recommended; it has some significant drawbacks: No vMotion, No DRS

Identify which keys need to be pressed to release the focus of a VM console window

CTRL+ALT

Understand what hovering the mouse does in relation to basic charts

Displays nothing, however hovering the mouse over the chart in Advanced Performance Chart, more information is displayed.

Understand ESXI considerations for choosing which model server

Dual Core 64bit x86 CPU, 8GB RAM, 1GB NIC, SCSI, SATA, USB Disk

Identify core services of VCenter

ESX/ESXi host management, Resource management, Template management, VM deployment, VM management, Scheduled tasks, Statistics and logging, Alarms and event management

name the 3 reasons to use automation

Efficiency-Automation lets you complete repeated tasks with less effort Accuracy - automation allows consistent repetition of tasks Capacity - with automation tasks that would take hours manually can be completed in minutes or seconds.

Explain how SSH can be enabled

Enabled by vSphere Client or DCUI. Disabled by default.

Define Fibre channel

Fibre Channel, or FC, is a high-speed network technology (commonly running at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 128 gigabit per second rates) primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers. Fibre Channel is mainly used in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data centers.

Identify the 3 Vmotion main settings in relation to VM override

Fully-Automated Partially-Automated Manual

Identify RAM Speeds in relation to VMkernal swap that resides on SSD

In the event that none of the previously described technologies trim guest OS memory usage enough, the ESXi host will be forced to use hypervisor swapping. Hypervisor swapping means that ESXi is going to swap memory pages out to disk. Even swapping to SSD (Solid State Drive) is considerably slower than directly accessing RAM. RAM Access time = 10 nanoseconds SSD seek time = 500 microseconds Magnetic disk seek time = 8 milliseconds SSD+0.0005/0.00000001=50,000xslower magnetic disk +.008/.00000001=800,000xslower

Understand and identify different types of traffic

In vSphere 6.0, a number of services that were previously the responsibility of management traffic have been split into discrete services that can be attached to a unique VMkernel interface. These services, are Provisioning Traffic, vSphere Replication Traffic, and vSphere Replication NFC (Network File Copy) Traffic.

Identify Virtual motherboards

Intel 440BX motherboard

Identify ESXI installation options

Interactive - Physical CD or mount ISO, limited configuration options PXE Network boot - Kickstart (similar to Linux) Auto Deploy - required VCenter host profiles, persistent or non-persistent, vSphere Auto Deploy can be configured with one of three different modes: Stateless, Stateless Caching, Stateful Install.

Identify the character used within powercli to pass object from one command to another

Pipe Symbol : |

Understand how Port Groups connect and Function

Port groups differentiate between the types of traffic passing through a vSwitch, and they also operate as a boundary for communication and/or security policy configuration. A logical object on a vSwitch that provides specialized services for the VMkernel or VMs. A virtual switch can contain a VMkernel port or a VM port group. On a vSphere Distributed Switch, these are called distributed port groups.

Identify the four main tools for automation within Vsphere

PowerCLI vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) vSphere Software Developement kit (SDK) for Perl

Identify actions that can be taken when defining Alarms

Send a notification email Send a notification trap via SNMP Change the power state on a VM Migrate a VM Run a Command

Explain the concept of VMOTION

Technology that enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity. It is transparent to users.

Understand what guest OS's see in a virtual environment in relation to monitoring and performance

The guest operating system can only view what it is allocated.

Explain snapshots and their use

The snapshot captures the state of the VM at a specific point in time. Guests can be quiesced at the same time. Admins can then revert to their pre-snapshot state in the event the changes made since the snapshot should be discarded. If the changes should be preserved, the admin can commit the changes and delete the snapshot.

Understand the VPX user account

The vpxuser account is created automatically by vCenter when adding a host to the inventory and is assigned the Administrator role. When logging onto vCenter, you are not logging on to ESXi hosts directly. When vCenter Server polls an ESXi host or an administrator creates a task that needs to be communicated to an ESXi host, the vpxuser account is used. The vpxuser account and password are stored in the vCenter Server database and on the ESXi hosts; this account is used to communicate from a vCenter Server computer to an ESXi host. The vpxuser password consists of 32 (randomly selected) characters, is encrypted using SHA1 on an ESXi host, and is obfuscated on vCenter Server. Each vpxuser password is unique to the ESXi host being managed by vCenter Server.

Identify and understand Provisioning of disks

Thin Provisioning - disk uses only as much as the guest OS in the VM uses Lazy Zeroed (Lazy Thick) - disk doesnt pre-zero unused space, so an array with thin provisioning would show only 100 GB used. Eager Zeroed (Eager Thick) - disk is zeroed to show space is being utilized so an array would show max disk space being used.

Identify the four basic components for ESXI and Vcenter server security model:

User or Group - A user is an authentication mechanism; a group is a way of collecting users. Users and groups form a basic building block of the security model. Privilege: A privilege is an action that you can perform on an inventory object. EG: Allocating space in a datastore, powering on a VM, configuring the network, or attaching a virtual CD/DVD to a VM. Role - A role is a collection of privileges. Both vCenter and ESXi ship with built-in roles, as I'll show you shortly, and you can also create your own custom roles. Permission - A permission allows a user to perform the activities specified by a role assigned to an inventory object. EG: You might assign a role that has all privileges to a particular inventory object. Attaching the role to the inventory object creates a permission.

Understand what Vsphere Update manager(VUM) integrates with

VUM integrates tightly with vSphere's inherent cluster features. It can use the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for nondisruptive updating of ESX/ESXi hosts by moving its VMs between hosts in the cluster and avoiding downtime. It can coordinate with the cluster's Distributed Power Management (DPM), High Availability (HA), and Fault Tolerance (FT) settings to ensure that they don't prevent VUM from updating at any stage. Introduced in vSphere 5, the cluster can even calculate if it can remediate multiple hosts at once while still appeasing its cluster constraints, thus speeding up the overall patching process.

Understand the plethora of counters with a host to monitor memory usage and Which ones you select based on what you're looking for. It is common to monitor straight memory usage, but don't forget that there are other counters that could be helpful, such as Ballooning, Unreserved, VMkernel Swap, and Shared.

Verify that VMware tools is installed on each virtual machine, the balloon driver is installed with VMware tools and is critical to performance verify that the balloon driver is enabled, the VMKernal regularly reclaims unused virtual machine memory by ballooning and swapping. Generally, this does not impact virtual machine performance. reduce the memory space on the virtual machine and correct the cache size if it is too large. this frees up memory for other virtual machines if the virtual memory reservation of the virtual machine is set to a value much higher than its active memory, decrease the reservation setting so that VMKernal can reclaim the idle memory for other virtual machines on the host. migrate one or more virtual machines to a host in a DRS cluster.

Understand virtual CPU cores

Virtual Core processor in you Virtual Machine, 32,64 and 128 vmware 6.0 hardware version 11, the max is 128 cores.

Understand the VMotion technology

a technology that can perform a live migration of a VM from one ESXi Host to another ESXi Host without service interruption. no downtime operation network connected are not dropped application continue running uninterrupted

Define ESXI

enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers.

Identify what construct you should use to control resource allocation for a collection of VMs belonging to an individual business group or tenant of your virtual infrastructure

resource pool allocating resources to a collection of VMs

Explain what Admission control setting allows

the Admission Control Policy settings control its behavior by determining how many resources need to be reserved and the limit that the cluster can handle and still be able to tolerate failure. The vSphere HA Admission Control and Admission Control Policy settings control the behavior of the vSphere HA-enabled cluster with regard to cluster capacity. Specifically, should vSphere HA allow the user to power on more VMs than it has capacity to support in the event of a failure? Or should the cluster prevent more VMs from being powered on than it can actually protect? That is the basis for the Admission Control—and by extension, the Admission Control Policy—settings

Understand when to run Platform Service Controller(PSC)

the Platform Services Controller (PSC). Used to run common components for VMware products in a central or in distributed location(s). The PSC offers multiple services; let's step through them so you can understand why the PSC is vital to your vSphere environment: Single Sign-On Licensing Certificate Authority Certificate Store Service Registry

Understand storage sharing between hosts

when ESXi Hosts are connected to the same shared storage, they share its capabilities. VSphere offers several shared storage protocol choices, including fiber channel, fiber channel over ethernet/FCoE/ iSCSI and network file system which is a form of NAS. The overall performance of the VMs and the entire vSphere cluster both depend on shared storage, which can also be highly consolidated and oversubscribed, Many of vSphere's advanced features either depend or work better on shared storage: HA, DRS, FT, SIOC, SRM

Identify Advantages of running VCenter on a VM

•Rather than dedicating a physical server to the vCenter Server application, you can install vCenter Server in a virtual machine registered to an ESXi/ESX host in the environment. •You can provide high availability for the vCenter Server system by using VMware HA. •You can migrate the virtual machine containing the vCenter Server system from one host to another, enabling maintenance and other activities. •Provides the ability to use snapshots for virtual machine-level backup utilities (such as VMware Data Recovery) and for restore points before installing update packages.