- What is a port group & different port groups available?
Ans. Port groups are templates for creating virtual ports with particular sets of specifications. You can create a maximum of 512 port groups on a single host.
There are two types of port groups in ESXi :
- Virtual Machine Port group : It is used by VMs for communication .
- VM Kernel Port group : It is used by ESX/ESXi as a management network (for vMotion traffic, ISCSI & NFS communication )
- What is PSOD?
Ans. A Purple Screen Of Death is a diagnostic screen & it is displayed when the VM Kernel of an ESX/ESXi host experience a critical error , becomes in-operative and terminates any virtual machines that are running on the host .
PSOD details the memory state at the time of crash & includes other information such as the ESXi version, build, the exception type, register dump, what was running on each CPU at the time of Crash, back trace, Server uptime, core dump information and error message.
The Core dump is a memory dump file which can be utilized for further troubleshooting.
- What is VMKernel?
Ans. VM Kernel is a POSIX-like operating system developed by VMWare .
VM Kernel is a linkage between virtual machines and the physical hardware .The VM Kernel is responsible for allocating memory, scheduling CPUs & providing other hardware abstraction & OS services .
- Port number required or used for vMotion?
Ans.7444 – vCenter Single sign-on , VMWare Secure Token Service
8000 – Request from vMotion
8009 – AJP connector port for vCenter appliance
8100 – Traffic between ESX hosts for vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT).
- What is the difference between standard switch & distributed switch?
Ans . In a VMware environment, switches bring the physical network to virtual machines (VMs), while standard virtual switches and distributed virtual switches enable a sophisticated virtual network topology between VMs, hosts and host clusters.
A network switch directs network traffic. Similarly, a virtual switch (vSwitch) carries VMs’ traffic to the physical network and to other VMs.
Distributed vSwitches, enable more features than standard vSwitches. A standard vSwitch works within one ESX/ESXi host only. Distributed vSwitches allow different hosts to use the switch as long as they exist within the same host cluster. A distributed vSwitch extends its ports and management across all the servers in a cluster, supporting up to 500 hosts per distributed switch.
- How to find out interface card speed in ESXi?
Ans. Vicfg-nics –list
- What are the parameters master host monitors of all slave hosts?
Ans. The master host uses network and data store heart beating to determine the type of failure. The master host monitors power state of all protected vms also act as a vCenter Server management to the cluster and reporting the cluster heath state.
- How to cancel a hang task in ESXi server?
Ans. In ESXi console run PS command or ps|grep VM_name & kill the PID.
- What is “auto deploy” in VM ware?
Ans . vSphere Auto Deploy lets you provision hundreds of physical hosts with ESXi software. Using Auto Deploy, experienced system administrators can manage large deployments efficiently. Hosts are network-booted from a central Auto Deploy server. Optionally, hosts are configured with a host profile of a reference host.
- What is port 902 used for on vCenter ?
Ans. Port 902 is the default port vCenter uses to send data to host managed by vCenter .