VMware Interview Answers

1. List the major components of VMware Infrastructure

The major components of VMware infrastructure are:

• ESX server host
• Virtual Centre Server
• Virtual Infrastructure (VI) client
• Web Browser
• License Server
• Database

2. Which softwares are supported to install Virtual Centre Server Software?

The VirtualCentre Server is supported as a service on the 32 bit versions of these operating systems:

The virtual centre installer requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher in order to run.

Windows 2000 server SP4 with update Rollup 1

Windows 2003

3. Which Databases are supported to VirtualCentre?

Virtual Centre supports the following database formats:

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (SP 4 only)

Oracle 9iR2, 10gR1 and 10gR2

Microsoft MSDE

4. What is virtualization?

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resource.

5. What is a Hypervisor?

A hypervisor, also called a virtual machine manager, is program that allows multiple operating syste,s to share a single hardware host. Each operating system appears to have the host’s processor, memory, and other resources all to itself. However, the hypervisor is actually controlling the host processor and resources, allocating what is needed to each operating system in turn and making sure that the guest operating systems cannot disrupt each other.

6. What is ESX Server?

ESX server is VMware’s flagship enterprise server virtualization platform. It comes in two versions ESX Server and ESxi Server where the latter has no service console and is the thinnest version available. ESX Server has many optional features like Vmotion and VMHA (both discussed below) and some built-in features like the VMFS file system.

7. What’s the difference between Hyper-V and Virtual Server?

Hyper-V is a type-1 hypervisor where Virtual Server is a type 2 hypervisor. Virtual server requires that you first host a windows operating system to load it.

Hyper-V is meant to be a higher performance commercial virtualizations platform with a centralized management platform and 3^rd party add-ons. Virtual Server, on the other hand, is a free virtualization platform meant for the desktop or for small-scale server virtualization solutions.

8. What are the different types of virtualization?

• Server Virtualization
• Application Virtualization
• Presentation Virtualization
• Network Virtualization
• Storage Virtualization

9. What is VMware HA?

A capability of VMware ESX. With 2 ESX servers, a SAN for shared storage, virtual centre and a VMHA license, if a single ESX server fails, the virtual guests on that server will move over to the other server and restart it, within seconds. This feature works regardless of the operating system used or if the applications support it.

10. What is Virtual Centre?

Both VMware Virtual Centre and Microsoft System Centre are centralized management applications for their respective virtualization platform.

11. What is a partition?

A partition is what is managed by a hypervisor.