Your Daily VMware quiz!

tomtom1

Oh, lol.

Next one up. vSphere 6 introduces the content library, which I'm kind of fond of since it provides a central way of delivering certain services to users. Which kind of vSphere objects can be stored in the content library and what is the maximum amount of objects?

jibbajabba

tomtom1 wrote: »

Oh, lol.

Next one up. vSphere 6 introduces the content library, which I'm kind of fond of since it provides a central way of delivering certain services to users. Which kind of vSphere objects can be stored in the content library and what is the maximum amount of objects?

Answers below


VM Templates
vApps
ISOs
OVF / OVAs
Scripts

Not sure about the limit of objects, I think you can have 5 concurrent items per library

tomtom1

@jibbajabba: Very well done, the limit I meant was that the content library can hold up to 200 items which can be a maximum of 64 TB in size.

Next one:

What are the default HA slot sizes if you do not specify anything? How does this impact your HA cluster? And what happens if a reservation is set on a VM?

Essendon

I'll let someone else have a go at the above question. Can we have the questions in RED please guys just so they stand out?

Your hardware vendor has supplied you with a new custom installation bundle for your hosts. When you attempt to install you get a message saying it has been rejected because it wasnt upto a certain level. What is this level and how can you fix this problem?

This level is called the Host Image Profile Acceptance Level, any installation bundles below this level are rejected. There are 4 levels:

- Partner Supported
- Community Supported
- VMware Certified
- VMware Accepted

You can either alter your host's level or get the vendor to obtain one of these levels. Community and Partner Supported may not fly well with VMware Support!

Essendon

A new admin, John, has joined your company. He's been given administrator rights to vCenter (there's only one). He goes to the web client URL, punches in his username as john and the correct password but he's unable to logon (message is incorrect username/password). You come over to investigate and immediately tell him his username should be contoso\john. Why?

Without the domain name prefix, vCenter SSO will try to authenticate against the vsphere.local domain, by default. With the domain specified, vCenter SSO will authenticate against the contoso domain.

jibbajabba

Your vSphere 5 Test / QA cluster is using a vSAN made of a 1TB SAS spindles and a 120GB SSD. You read about vSphere 6 and the all-flash possibility.

You intend to upgrade your cluster to vSphere 6 and re-create the vSAN Cluster.

You evacuate the vSAN and disable it. You then swap the 1TB SAS spindles with your 1TB SSD. However, after enabling vSAN you notice that the vSAN datastore has no capacity and whilst both disks are being displayed in the disk groups, the overview (Virtual SAN > General) displays 0 of 0 eligable disks in use.

What went wrong? How can you fix this? ( answer below in #F2F6F8 )


By default VSAN will use flash disks for caching only. Like you are able to mark HDDs as SSDs, you now need to mark SSDs as capicty disks.

To fix, login to your host via SSH and run the command vdq -q

You will now see your SSDs listed

[root@esxi-01:~] vdq -q
[
{
"Name" : "naa.1234567890qwerty",
"VSANUUID" : "",
"State" : "Eligible for use by VSAN",
"ChecksumSupport": "0",
"Reason" : "None",
"IsSSD" : "1",
"IsCapacityFlash": "0",
"IsPDL" : "0",
},

Here you can see that the disk naa.123456789qwerty is not marked as capacity disk

Tag your desired SSD as capacity disk

esxcli vsan storage tag add -d naa.1234567890qwerty -t capacityFlash

Now confirm that the SSD is marked as capcity disk

[root@esxi-01:~] vdq -q
[
{
"Name" : "naa.1234567890qwerty",
"VSANUUID" : "",
"State" : "Eligible for use by VSAN",
"ChecksumSupport": "0",
"Reason" : "None",
"IsSSD" : "1",
"IsCapacityFlash": "1",
"IsPDL" : "0",
},

You can now go ahead and create your all-flash vSAN. Your capcity disk will now shown as HDD (even though it is an SSD)

kj0

Essendon wrote: »

A new admin, John, has joined your company. He's been given administrator rights to vCenter (there's only one). He goes to the web client URL, punches in his username as john and the correct password but he's unable to logon (message is incorrect username/password). You come over to investigate and immediately tell him his username should be contoso\john. Why?

Without the domain name prefix, vCenter SSO will try to authenticate against the vsphere.local domain, by default. With the domain specified, vCenter SSO will authenticate against the contoso domain.

Default identity source has not been set to that particular domain.

jibbajabba

kj0 wrote: »

Default identity source has not been set to that particular domain.

I'd say he forgot to use the full fqdn / domain prefix. Unless he uses contoso\un, SSO will use vsphere.local as default domain.

Identity source is probably configured already because "You" tell John to use his domain credentials.

jibbajabba

You are tasked to deploy an appliance on a fresh vSphere 6 environment and connect it to the Lookup Service.

You enter the following details



But you receive the following error



What seems to be the problem ?

See answer below



In vSphere 6, the Lookup Service now runs on port 443 instead of 7444

tomtom1

Very good questions guys, didn't know, for example, that the lookup service now runs on port 443. Same goes for the webclient, it isn't 8443 anymore but just 443.

I'm up, I guess:

What 2 things does VM component protection protect against, and what is the difference between those scenario's?

jibbajabba

tomtom1 wrote: »

Very good questions guys, didn't know, for example, that the lookup service now runs on port 443. Same goes for the webclient, it isn't 8443 anymore but just 443.

Queue eager admins upgrading vSphere, blowing everything up and networks not able to see in the firewall logs that things ... changed

tomtom1

Q: Which licensing edition is required for a VM to enable FT fast-checkpointing with 4 vCPU's and 64 GB of memory?

jibbajabba

tomtom1 wrote: »

Q: Which licensing edition is required for a VM to enable FT fast-checkpointing with 4 vCPU's and 64 GB of memory?

Must be higher than Enterprise Plus. Some sort of secret MI7 / CIB / FBJ licence because my Enterprise Plus only let's me enable 1vCPU for some reason to a point where I have given up.

tomtom1

jibbajabba wrote: »

Must be higher than Enterprise Plus. Some sort of secret MI7 / CIB / FBJ licence because my Enterprise Plus only let's me enable 1vCPU for some reason to a point where I have given up.

Well, the standard & enterprise licenses allow for 2 vCPU FT, the enterprise plus allows 4-vCPU FT.

Weird that you can't go higher than 1 vCPU. You're doing this via the web client right?

jibbajabba

tomtom1 wrote: »

Well, the standard & enterprise licenses allow for 2 vCPU FT, the enterprise plus allows 4-vCPU FT.

Weird that you can't go higher than 1 vCPU. You're doing this via the web client right?

I do and it says the 2vCPUs configured are above limited. Will test again.

tomtom1

And another one:

When using VVOLs, what is considered the maximum file size for a given VMDK (data) VVOL?

Essendon

Hey Tom, is it = to maximum size of a vmdk? I'm not sure of this one.

Essendon

I'll chuck in some more questions to aid people preparing for their VCP6 test.

Q. A requirement has arisen in your client's environment to prevent three VMs in the same subnet from talking to each other. You relish the opportunity of having to configure a PVLAN for this requirement. You jump right in and create a promiscuous VLAN and an isolated PVLAN. You put the 3 VMs in a port group and assign it the PVLAN. Elated at completing this requirement you hand this setup over. The customer runs a test and discovers the VMs are still able to talk to each other. This enrages the customer and she comes at you holding a meat cleaver with her mouth frothing. What can you do to rectify the technical issue? What have you missed in the config?

kj0

tomtom1 wrote: »

And another one:

When using VVOLs, what is considered the maximum file size for a given VMDK (data) VVOL?

When it won't go any further?

kj0

Essendon wrote: »

I'll chuck in some more questions to aid people preparing for their VCP6 test.

Q. A requirement has arisen in your client's environment to prevent three VMs in the same subnet from talking to each other. You relish the opportunity of having to configure a PVLAN for this requirement. You jump right in and create a promiscuous VLAN and an isolated PVLAN. You put the 3 VMs in a port group and assign it the PVLAN. Elated at completing this requirement you hand this setup over. The customer runs a test and discovers the VMs are still able to talk to each other. This enrages the customer and she comes at you holding a meat cleaver with her mouth frothing. What can you do to rectify the technical issue? What have you missed in the config?

Not set up the PVLAN at the Switch level.

Essendon

Q. You are upgrading a customer's environment that has a mix of clusters running vSphere 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1. vCenter Servers running 5.0 and 5.1 versions are easily upgraded to 6.0. But the 4.1 > 6.0 upgrade is a different kettle of fish. How would you upgrade 4.1 to 6.0?

jibbajabba

Essendon wrote: »

Q. You are upgrading a customer's environment that has a mix of clusters running vSphere 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1. vCenter Servers running 5.0 and 5.1 versions are easily upgraded to 6.0. But the 4.1 > 6.0 upgrade is a different kettle of fish. How would you upgrade 4.1 to 6.0?

You

A. Say you don't like it and rather migrate
or
B. Upgrade to 5 first, then go to 6.

Bear in mind you need to upgrade vCenter first before attacking the hosts.

kj0

Q. During a Cross vCenter vMotion. What prevents a duplicate MAC address from being created on the old vCenter?

a) Access Deny List
b) MAC Deny List
c) Block List
d) Blacklist
e) Scratch list

jibbajabba

kj0 wrote: »

Q. During a Cross vCenter vMotion. What prevents a duplicate MAC address from being created on the old vCenter?

a) Access Deny List
b) MAC Deny List
c) Block List
d) Blacklist
e) Scratch list

VCenter maintains a blacklist.

Deathmage

Essendon wrote: »

Q. You are upgrading a customer's environment that has a mix of clusters running vSphere 4.1, 5.0 and 5.1. vCenter Servers running 5.0 and 5.1 versions are easily upgraded to 6.0. But the 4.1 > 6.0 upgrade is a different kettle of fish. How would you upgrade 4.1 to 6.0?

I'd upgrade to 5 1st and then go to 6.

Deathmage

kj0 wrote: »

Q. During a Cross vCenter vMotion. What prevents a duplicate MAC address from being created on the old vCenter?

a) Access Deny List
b) MAC Deny List
c) Block List
d) Blacklist
e) Scratch list

Hmm..I've never seen that one before..

Deathmage

Boy I'm gone a week playing withy new EqualLogic at work and I miss VMware trivia /facepalm

kj0

Deathmage wrote: »

Boy I'm gone a week playing withy new EqualLogic at work and I miss VMware trivia /facepalm

It's really only picked up in the last 2 days.

As for the Cross vCenter vMotion. It's new in vSphere 6.0, You can find the answer in the What's New overview PDF. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMW-WP-vSPHR-Whats-New-6-0-PLTFRM.pdf

jibbajabba

Deathmage wrote: »

Boy I'm gone a week playing withy new EqualLogic at work and I miss VMware trivia /facepalm

OT but funny you mention Dell EQLs. We were one of the first ones in the UK to trials these ones back in the day (4k series or something) and the engineer / sales monkey combo were trying to tell us how great and stable and whatnot it is.

Whilst they were still chatting to our director i managed to blow it to bits (software wise) .. Needless to say the Dell guys where somewhat confused how that was possible and were embarrassed ..

We were still OEM partners at the end and I loved 'em .... Even though the initial setup was a bit rubbish network wise. You had to play with VLANs to get it setup in the right networks ... Ah ... good old days ..

tomtom1

I still think of Equallogic as one of the best SANs, especially for the smaller environments. Easy to setup, easy to manage and up to a few units easy to scale. Had one until very recently and I was more than happy with it. Did it's job for more than 3 years without even a single moment of downtime or issues, effectively 100% uptime.