Until this point in the book, we have considered designing and building the vSphere platform on which each guest VM runs. This is an important and inter-esting aspect for a vAdmin, but it definitely does not stop there. As a VMware engineer, you may not actually manage the guest operating systems. However, it is very important to remember that user applications run within guest operating systems. This is the environment where users’ work is actually completed and their data is processed. Good virtual machine design can have a dramatic impact on application performance and other business or project objectives.
“Do I Know This Already?” Quiz
The “Do I Know This Already?” quiz allows you to assess whether you should read this entire chapter or simply jump to the “Exam Preparation Tasks” sec-tion for review. If you are in doubt, read the entire chapter. Table 5-1 outlines the major headings in this chapter and the corresponding “Do I Know This Already?” quiz questions. You can find the answers in Appendix A , “Answers to the ‘Do I Know This Already?’ and Chapter Review Questions.”
Table 5-1 Do I Know This Already?” Foundation Topics Section-to-Question Mapping Foundations Topics Section Questions Covered in This Section Virtual Machines—From the Design Perspective 3, 4
Guest Virtual Machine Component Considerations
1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10–12, 14, 15
OVFs 7, 8, 13
ptg10893717 2 a.m. Which of the following would enable a suitable baseline to be derived, and, from a design perspective, not impact the platform?
a. Configure a VM memory and CPU limit to ensure zero impact on other user applications
b. Configure a memory and CPU reservation to guarantee a level of re-sources for load performance evaluation
c. Amend share values to high
3. Which of the following does vApp functionality require?
6. You have been asked to design a virtual machine for an as-yet-unwritten appli-cation. The high-level requirements are known, but aspects such as workload and application behavior (for example, memory driven, CPU driven) are not yet determined. Which of the following scaling approached would best suit this scenario?
a. Predictive
b. Adaptive
ptg10893717 7. You are a member of a project team that consists of the following:
A business user (based in the UK)
Two software developers (based in the UK)
Two software testers (based in the United States and India) One platform engineer (based in the UK)
The team requires multiple environments of the same infrastructure to work within the software development life cycle. Each environment consists of two web servers, a load balancer virtual appliance, an application server, and a da-tabase server. Which of the following would allow ease of management and deployment?
a. Create a single virtual machine template and deploy servers as required for each stage of the SDLC (development, testing, staging, production).
b. Create a single vApp that consists of the five servers. Use this as a de-ployment object for each stage of the SDLC.
c. Create a single environment in vSphere 5 and allow users who are del-egated rights to use snapshots and clones to allow the team to work be-tween the stages.
8. Within the same scenario described in question 7, how would the server builds of each stage be easily shared and used between the teams in the United States and India without breaking guest operating system EULAs?
a. Convert the template used for the builds to a VM. Export the VM as an OVF and present the file to the team.
b. Export the vApp consisting of all server roles as an OVF.
c. Create a single environment in vSphere 5 and allow users who are del-egated rights to use snapshots and clones to allow the team to work be-tween the stages.
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9. You are a vSphere engineer working on a new vSphere 5 platform for an in-ternal customer. Your platform consists of two sites. One site is a running production environment, and the other is a limited-capacity site for DR. The link between sites is 100 MB. Due to internal compliance requirements, the production systems are based on separate clusters to test systems. Fully auto-mated DRS and DPM are to be used. Which of the following would minimize network bandwidth usage for replication of VMs and still allow vMotion func-tionality without impact to RTO or RPO?
a. At the cluster level, configure the default swap file location to local storage.
b. Configure traffic shaping to ensure that 30% of the network is used for replication.
c. Configure vSphere network shares to prioritize network usage on the 100 MB line.
10. A platform consists of 20 applications and 230 guest VMs running on 20 hosts.
Over a weekend, the operations team would like to perform maintenance on all hosts and some unpatched VMs. There are agreed outages during the weekend for each application. However, outside these times, the performance of the applications must meet normal requirements.
The operations team has expertise in hardware and the patching processes but very little knowledge of the applications and server relationships. Which of the following would be the best course of action?
a. Create a vApp for each application and configure the startup and shut-down order.
b. Create a PowerShell script to control the startup and shutdown order.
c. Specify restart priority in the VMware HA GUI.
11. vSphere HA does not recognize vApp startup order.
a. True
b. False
ptg10893717 12. An application consists of five servers. The application requires specific IP
ad-dresses to be configured for listener servers. Which of the following configu-rations would satisfy the requirement?
a. Configure a transient IP address pool and enter the range 192.168.117.23#5.
14. A custom application is created in-house; various services are required to be started in a specific order. It appears that the time it takes to start these ser-vices can vary, depending on a data feed from a third party. How should the vApp be configured with regard to startup order to enable effective manage-ment of the servers?
a. Add a large wait time between servers on startup order to ensure that the data feed is responding.
b. Because the feed is a variable and third-party solution, a vApp cannot be used to control the startup order of the application.
c. Configure the vApp to wait for VMware tools to be ready on each server.
At the guest operating system level, ensure that the VMware tools ser-vice is dependent on the custom application serser-vices.
15. You are a consultant called to investigate an HA failure. The platform consists of 6 hosts and 100 VMs. Of these 100 VMs, 80 are VDI machines used by a call center. Theoretically, the system is overcommitted in memory by 150%;
however, under normal working conditions, the memory requirement is sup-ported. The logs show that the HA task was successful; however, a large num-ber of VDI machines failed to restart in sufficient time for the RTO. What could be the cause of the error?
a. Shared memory is being used to increase the consolidation ratio. This uses TPS and requires the process to run several times to allow the VMs to run. Add more ESXi hosts or reduce the VM reservations.
b. HA is reserving too much memory. Enable violation requirements.
c. VM monitoring was disabled. Keep it enabled where possible.
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