Mastering VMware vSphere 6 STUDY GUIDE

ESXi host's storage options

-Local SAS/SATA/SCSI -FC -FCoE -iSCSI -NAS (Specifically NFS) -InfiniBand

Understand the VMotion technology

-can perform a live migration of a VM from one ESXi host to another ESXi host without service interruption. -no-downtime operation -network connections are not dropped -applications continue running uninterrupted

What layers does HA apply to?

1. Application layer 2. Operating System Layer 3. Virtualization Layer 4. Physical Layer

Understand the counters used to monitor memory usage and which ones to select.

1. BALLOONING: Once installed (VMware tools), the balloon driver can respond to commands from the ESXi to reclaim memory from the VM guest OS. The balloon driver does this by requesting memory from the guest OS (inflating). 2. IDLE MEMORY TAX: Inside the guest OS, VMware Tools will use its balloon driver to understand which memory blocks are allocated but idle and, therefore, available to be used elsewhere. 3. TRANSPARENT PAGE SHARING: TPS looks for identical memory pages are shared among VMs to reduce the total number of memory pages consumed. (now disabled by default). 4. SWAPPING: 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. 5. UNRESERVED AND SHARED

Understand VUM baselines

1. Critical Host Patches 2. Non‐Critical Host Patches 3. dynamic baseline for upgrading VMware Tools 4. dynamic baseline for upgrading VM hardware

Identify actions that can be taken when defining Alarms

1. E-mail Notification 2. SNMP Notification 3. Run a command

Identify storage types supported on ESXI hosts

1. Fibre Channel 2. Fibre Channel over Ethernet(FCoE) 3. iSCSI 4. Network File System (NFS), which is a form of NAS.

Identify the 3 Vmotion Automation settings

1. Fully Automated 2. Partially Automated 3. Manual

Identify the four main tools for automation within Vsphere

1. PowerCLI 2. vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) 3. vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) 4. vSphere Software Development Kit (SDK) for Perl

Explain how SSH can be enabled

1. Remote Shell (SSH CLI) 2. vSphere Client or DCUI 3. Secure admin of ESXi over HTTPS (port 443)

Identify and understand Provisioning of disks

1. Thin-provisioned virtual disk uses only as much as the guest OS in the VM uses. (on demand) 2. Lazy zeroed disk doesn't pre-zero unused space. 3. Thickly provisioned (eager zeroed) virtual disk consumes 500 GB immediately because it is pre-zeroed.

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

1. User or Group 2. Privilege 3. Role 4. Permission

What is Management traffic

A special type of network traffic that runs across a VMkernel port. VMkernel ports provide network access for the VMkernel's TCP/IP stack, which is separate and independent from the network traffic generated by VMs.

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

Allocation: How much of a resource has been designated for use. Utilization: How effectively a resource is being used and managed.

Understand 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

Understand the three AAA's

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.

Identify ESXI installation options

Auto Deploy Interactive Pre eXecution Environment (PXE) Network Boot

Understand ESXI considerations for choosing which model server

Basically figuring out what hardware you'd want on your server. You should consider the number of RAM slots, as a higher number of RAM slots means that you can use lower-cost, lower density RAM modules and still reach high memory configurations. You should also consider server expansion options, such as the number of available Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) buses, expansion slots, and the types of expansion cards supported in the server.

Explain what Admission control setting allows

Can allow VMs to be powered on even if they violate availability constraints.

Explain snapshots and their use

Captures the state of the VM at a specific point in time. Guests can be quiesced at the same time.

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

Control+alt

Understand virtual CPU cores

Core processors in your host (max is 128)

Describe Features in VSPHERE 6

DRS Fault Tolerance High Availability Policy Based Storage Storage and Network I/O Control Virtual SMP vMotion

VMFS

Designed to be a clustered file system from its inception; neither NTFS nor ext3 is a clustered file system VMFS enables simple direct-to-disk, steady-state I/O that results in high throughput at a low CPU overhead for the ESXi hosts.

Understanding what hovering the mouse does in relation to basic charts within Advanced Performance Charts.

Hovering the mouse pointer over a chart to display additional information is only available

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

How slow is VMkernel swap compared to RAM? SSD: 50,000 x slower than RAM Magnetic Disk: 800,000 x slower than RAM

Understand what Vsphere Update manager(VUM) integrates with

Integrates tightly with vSphere's inherent cluster features. It uses Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Distributed Power Management (DPM), High Availability (HA), and Fault Tolerance (FT) for nondisruptive updating of ESX/ESXi hosts.

Identify Virtual motherboards

Intel 440BX motherboard

Understand VSPHERE Autodeploy along with Stateful Installs

Local disk first, then network second. Unless the server is specifically told to network boot again the auto deploy service is no longer needed. So basically, you remote into a machine, and drop an Operating System (ie. Windows) onto it, then tell it to boot from it's local disk (thus using the operating system you just dropped into it).

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

Pipe Symbol

Define Fiber channel

Relies on the concept of a "fabric," which is a fundamental concept in how the network works. In a fabric architecture, every switching device understands the nature of every other switching device.

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

Resource Pool

Identify core service areas of Vcenter

Resource management for ESXi host and VMs Template management VM deployment VM management Scheduled tasks Statistics and logging Alarms and event management ESXi host management

Identify Advantages of running vCenter on a VM

Running vCenter on a VM gives you several advantages , including snapshots, clones, vMotion, VSphere HA, Fault Tolerance, and vSphere DRS.

Explain the concept of VMOTION

Technology that enables live migration of running VMs from one physical server to another with ZERO DOWN TIME 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 see what it is allotted.

Understand the VPX user account

The vpx user 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.

Understand when to run Platform Services Controller (PSC)

Think of the Platform Services Controller (PSC) just like you do vCenter's supporting database. It can be embedded or external. If you need to scale your environment past a few hundred VMs for your vCenter Server(s), it's suggested to have an external PSC to accompany them. You only get the "single pane of glass" with Linked Mode if you join PSC SSO instances to the same SSO domain.

Define ESXI

Type one hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. Includes and integrates vital OS components.

Name the 3 reasons to use automation

Used to increase: 1. Efficiency 2. Accuracy 3. Capacity

Identify the ways to manage users within ESXI without Vcenter Server

Using command line tools or vSphere client.

How do vSwitches connect and Function?

Virtual Machine connects to a vSwitch, which then connects to vNIC(s) which then connects to a Physical Switch

How do portgroups connect and function?

Virtual machines use portgroups to connect to a Virtual switch. On the other side of that virtual switch are uplink connections to physical Ethernet adapters on the servers. Think of it like this: [VM]---portgroups---[virtual Switch]---uplink connections---[Physical Network Interface Card]---[NETWORK/INTERNET]