1. What is Virtualization?

Ans: Virtualization refers to creating a virtual version of computer hardware, operating

system (OS), storage device, or computer network resources. It is the process of creating an
abstract layer that breaks the hard connection between the physical hardware and the OS.
2. What is a hypervisor?
Ans: A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine manager/monitor (VMM), is computer
hardware virtualization software that allows several operating systems to share a single
hardware host. Each operating system appears to have the host's processor, memory, and
resources to itself.
3. What is an ESX?
Ans: VMware ESX is an enterprise-level computer virtualization product offered by VMware. It is
a hypervisor for guest virtual machines/servers that run without requiring an additional
underlying operating system. It runs on a bare metal hardware.
4. What is a Virtual Center?
Ans: It is a centralized management software for managing the virtual infrastructure (ESX hosts,
virtual machines, storage, memory, networking features, etc).
5. What is HA?
Ans: VMware HA (High Availability) is a utility that eliminates the need for dedicated
standby hardware and software in a virtualized environment. In an event of a host failure, the
failed virtual machines are automatically restarted on another ESX host.
6. What is a cluster?
Ans: A cluster is a group of hosts. When a host is added to a cluster, the host's resources
become part of the cluster's resources. The cluster manages the resources of all hosts within
it. Clusters enable the vSphere High Availability (HA) and vSphere Distributed Resource
Scheduler (DRS) solutions.
7. What is a datacenter?
Ans: A datacenter is a primary container of inventory objects such as the ESX hosts and virtual
machines. It is a centralized repository for storage and management of data.
8. What is native and para virtualization?
Ans: Native virtualization (or full virtualization) is where a type-2 hypervisor is used to partially
allow access to the hardware and to partially simulate hardware in order to allow you to load a
full operating system. This is used by packages like VMware Server, Workstation, Virtual PC, and
Virtual Server.

Para virtualization is where the guest operating systems run on the hypervisor, allowing for
higher performance and efficiency. Examples of para virtualization are Microsoft Hyper-V and
VMware ESX Server.
9. What is the difference between cloning and migration?
Ans: vMotion in ESX allows a virtual machine to move between two different hosts. During
vMotion, only the VMs memory contents are moved from one ESXi server to another. The VM
on the first ESXi server is duplicated on to the second ESXi server and then the original is
removed from the inventory on the source ESXi host. On the other hand, cloning creates a new
exact copy of the source VM with same configuration.
10. What is the purpose of a Virtual Center?
Ans: The purpose of virtual center is to manage the ESX hosts and virtual machines. All the wellknown features in vSphere are VMotion, Storage VMotion, Distributed Resource
Scheduler, VMware High Availability and Fault Tolerance.
11. What is the difference between ESXi 5.0 and ESXi 5.5?
Ans: There are many enhancements in ESXi 5.5 as below:
Hypervisor enhancements.

The ability to hot-swap traditional storage devices such as SATA and SAS hard disks on a
running vSphere host has been a huge benefit to systems administrators in reducing the
amount of downtime for virtual machine workloads.
The users are now able to hot-add or hot-remove an SSD device while a vSphere host is
running.
To protect against memory errors, vSphere ESXi Hypervisor can now take advantage of
new Reliable Memory Technology, a CPU hardware feature through which a region of
memory is copied from the hardware to vSphere ESXi Hypervisor which is then used to
optimize the placement of the VMkernel and guard against memory errors.

Virtual machine enhancements.

Virtual Machine Compatibility with VMware ESXi 5.5
Expanded Virtual Graphics Support.
Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests
vCenter server enhancements.
vCenter Single Sign-On
The authentication service of VMware vCloud Suite, has been greatly enhanced to
provide a richer experience that enables users to log in to vCloud Suite products in a
one-touch, single sign-on manner.
Simplified deployment.
A single installation model for end users.
Enhanced Microsoft Active Directory integration

The addition of native Active Directory support enables cross-domain

authentication.
Architecture
This architecture removes the requirement of a database.
vSphere Web Client.
The vSphere Web Client enables you to connect to a vCenter Server system to
manage an ESXi host through a browser.
vSphere Big Data Extensions(BDE):

A plug-in that enables administrators to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters on

vSphere using the vSphere web client.

Storage enhancements.

Support for 62TB VMDK

Networking enhancements.

Improved LACP capabilities.

o LACP is a standards-based method to control the bundling of several
physical network links together to form a logical channel for increased
bandwidth and redundancy purposes.
Traffic filtering.
Quality of Service tagging.
12. What is promiscuous mode?
Ans: By default, a guest operating system's virtual network adapter only receives frames that are
meant for it. Placing the guest's network adapter in promiscuous mode causes it to receive all
frames passed on the virtual switch. When promiscuous mode is enabled at the port group level,
all the objects defined within that port group have the option of receiving all incoming traffic on
the vSwitch. All the virtual machines within that port group will be able to see all traffic passing
on the vSwitch, but all other port groups within the same virtual switch are not able to see that.
When promiscuous mode is enabled at the virtual switch level, all port groups within the vSwitch
will allow promiscuous mode. However, promiscuous mode can be explicitly disabled at one or
more port groups within the vSwitch, which override the vSwitch-defined default.
13. What is raw device mapping?
Ans: Raw device mapping (RDM) is method to provide direct access to a LUN on an iscsi or fibre
channel storage system for a virtual machine.
14. What is fault tolerance?
Ans: VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for virtual machines by creating
and maintaining a Secondary VM that is identical to, and continuously available to replace the
Primary VM in the event of a host failure.

15. What is lockdown mode?

Ans: To increase the security of your ESXi hosts, you can put them in lockdown mode. When you
enable lockdown mode, no users other than vpxuser have authentication permissions, nor can
they perform operations against the host directly. Lockdown mode forces all operations to be
performed through vCenter Server.
16. What is ballooning?
Ans: Memory ballooning is a memory management technique that allows a physical host to take
advantage of unused memory on its guest virtual machines (VMs).When a host operating
system is short on physical memory, the hypervisor polls balloon drivers installed on the guest
operating

systems to

request

available

memory.

The

guests

respond

by

using page reclaiming algorithms to determine which pages are available and can be assigned to
the balloon drivers. The process of assigning available pages to the driver is known as inflating
the balloon. Releasing available pages is known as deflating the balloon. Memory ballooning
permits the total amount of RAM required by guest virtual machines to exceed the amount of
physically available RAM on the host.
17. What is a swap file?
Ans: When you load a file or program, the file is stored in the random access memory (RAM).
Since RAM is finite, some files cannot fit on it. These files are stored in a special section of the
hard drive called the "swap file".
18. What is swapping?
Ans: Swapping is a simple memory/process management technique used by the operating
system to increase the utilization of the processor by moving some blocked process from the
main memory to the secondary memory (hard disk) thus forming a queue of temporarily
suspended processes and the execution continues with the newly arrived process.
19. What is paging?
Ans: Paging is a memory-management scheme by which a computer can store and retrieve data
from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves
data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called pages.
20. What is a semaphore?
Ans: A semaphore is a technique for coordinating or synchronizing activities in which multiple
processes compete for the same operating system resources. A semaphore protects access to a
resource that is shared between two or more processes, or threads. A semaphore typically has
test, lock, test and lock, and unlock operations.

21. What is a deadlock?

Ans:

deadlock

is

situation

which

occurs

when

a process or thread enters

waiting state because a resource requested is being held by another waiting process, which in
turn is waiting for another resource.
22. What is garbage collection?
Ans: Garbage collection is a form of automatic memory management. The garbage collector, or
just collector, attempts to reclaim garbage, or memory occupied by objects that are no longer in
use by the program. OR Garbage collection is the systematic recovery of pooled
computer storage that is being used by a program when that program no longer needs it. This
frees the storage for use by other programs or processes within a program.
23. What is a heap memory?
Ans: The heap memory segment is an area of memory used for dynamic allocations, heap is the
portion of memory where dynamically allocated memory resides (i.e. memory allocated
via malloc). Memory allocated from the heap will remain allocated until one of the following
occurs:
1. The memory is free'd
2. The program terminates.
24. What is malloc?
Ans: In C, the library function malloc is used to allocate a block of memory on the heap. The
program accesses this block of memory via a pointer that malloc returns. When the memory is
no longer needed, the pointer is passed to free which deallocates the memory so that it can be
used for other purposes.
25. What are the differences between malloc and calloc?
Ans: There are two differences:
1. First, is in the number of arguments. Malloc() takes a single argument (memory required
in bytes), while calloc() needs two arguments.
2. Secondly, malloc() does not initialize the memory allocated, while calloc() initializes the
allocated memory to ZERO.
3. malloc() allocates a single block of memory of REQUSTED SIZE and returns a pointer to
first byte. If it fails to locate requested amount of memory it returns a null pointer.
4. calloc() allocates a memory area, the length will be the product of its parameters. calloc
fills the memory with ZERO's and returns a pointer to first byte. If it fails to locate
enough space it returns a NULL pointer.