SK0-005 server-administration Practice Test 7 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company's backup policy requires that all server backups be written to removable media that can be stored offsite. The backup administrator is configuring a new Windows Server 2022 server and needs to ensure that the backup target appears as a locally attached disk to the backup software. The media must support being rotated daily and must not require the server to be powered off. Which type of storage should the administrator use?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

External USB 3.0 hard disk drive. The requirement is for removable media that appears as a locally attached disk and can be rotated offsite without powering down the server. An external USB hard drive meets all these conditions: it presents as a local disk, is easily removable, and supports daily rotation. Other options either do not appear as local disks or are not designed for frequent physical transport.

Answer

Tape library connected via Fibre Channel

Answer

Internal SATA solid-state drive (SSD) in a hot-swap bay

Answer

iSCSI target on a network-attached storage (NAS) device

Question 2

A server administrator is troubleshooting a server that intermittently reboots without warning. The server is running Windows Server 2019 and hosts a critical application. The administrator checks the event logs and finds Event ID 41 (Kernel-Power). Which of the following should the administrator check first?

Accepted Answer

The power supply unit (PSU). Event ID 41 (Kernel-Power) indicates that the system rebooted without a clean shutdown, often due to power interruption. The most likely hardware cause is the power supply unit. Checking the PSU's capacity and health is the logical first step.

Answer

The memory (RAM) modules

Answer

The hard drive for bad sectors

Answer

The CPU temperature

Question 3

A Linux server administrator notices that a server's root filesystem is running out of space. The administrator runs 'df -h' and sees that / is 100% full, but 'du -sh /*' shows that the total size of all directories is only 20 GB, while the filesystem is 100 GB. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause?

Accepted Answer

A large file has been deleted but is still held open by a running process.. The discrepancy between df and du is typically caused by deleted files that are still held open by running processes. These files no longer have directory entries, so du does not see them, but the kernel keeps the blocks allocated until the file descriptors are closed. The administrator can identify such files using lsof +L1 or by checking /proc/*/fd.

Answer

The root filesystem is actually a logical volume that is not properly resized.

Answer

There are many small files that du is not counting due to a bug.

Answer

The filesystem has suffered corruption, causing df to report incorrect usage.

Question 4

A company runs a critical web application on a Windows Server 2022 with IIS. The application uses a SQL Server 2019 database on a separate server. Users report that the application sometimes becomes unresponsive for 30–60 seconds, then recovers. Performance Monitor on the web server shows a spike in ASP.NET Requests Queued and a drop in Requests/Sec during the incidents. The database server shows no performance issues. Which action should the administrator take to resolve the intermittent unresponsiveness?

Accepted Answer

Analyze and optimize the application code to eliminate blocking calls and improve asynchronous processing.. Intermittent unresponsiveness with spikes in ASP.NET Requests Queued and reduced Requests/Sec typically indicates thread pool starvation caused by blocking operations in the application. Optimizing code to use asynchronous calls and eliminating blocking I/O allows the thread pool to handle more concurrent requests, resolving the queuing and restoring responsiveness. Other options do not address the root cause.

Answer

Configure the application pool to use a dedicated identity with higher privileges.

Answer

Enable Web Garden mode by setting the maximum worker processes to 4.

Answer

Increase the ASP.NET request queue limit in the application pool settings.

Question 5

A Linux server is experiencing random reboots. The administrator checks the system logs and finds multiple entries indicating a machine check exception (MCE). The server is running the latest kernel and all firmware is up to date. Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the reboots?

Accepted Answer

Failing CPU or memory hardware.. Machine check exceptions are hardware-level errors reported by the CPU, most commonly due to failing RAM or CPU. Random reboots with MCE logs indicate a hardware fault that firmware updates cannot resolve. The correct course is to run hardware diagnostics and replace the faulty component.

Answer

Overheating due to failed cooling fans.

Answer

A faulty power supply unit.

Answer

Incorrect kernel parameters for memory management.

Question 6

A company runs a busy web application on a single Windows Server 2022 server with 32 GB RAM, two 8-core CPUs, and a hardware RAID 10 array. Users report intermittent slowdowns, and Performance Monitor shows that the PhysicalDisk\% Idle Time counter for the data volume frequently drops below 10% while the Processor\% Processor Time remains around 40%. The server hosts the web application, its SQL Server 2019 database, and the operating system on the same RAID 10 array. Which of the following is the MOST appropriate next step to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Move the SQL Server database files and logs to separate dedicated physical disk arrays.. The PhysicalDisk\% Idle Time counter below 10% indicates the disk subsystem is saturated, while processor utilization is moderate. Separating SQL Server data and log files onto dedicated arrays reduces I/O contention and improves overall throughput. Adding RAM or upgrading CPUs does not target the actual bottleneck, and enabling write caching without protection adds risk without guaranteeing a fix.

Answer

Upgrade the CPUs to higher-frequency models to reduce disk queue length.

Answer

Add more RAM to the server to reduce disk paging.

Answer

Enable write caching on the RAID controller without a battery backup unit.

Question 7

A system administrator is setting up a new server and needs to ensure that the server's time is synchronized with an external time source. Which protocol should be used?

Accepted Answer

NTP. NTP is the correct protocol for synchronizing server time with external sources. It is specifically designed for this purpose and is widely supported. Other protocols listed serve different functions and cannot synchronize time. Accurate time is essential for security protocols, logging, and scheduled tasks.

Answer

SNMP

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LDAP

Answer

SMTP

Question 8

A server administrator is setting up a new Windows Server 2022 file server. The server has two 1 TB NVMe drives. The administrator wants to ensure that if one drive fails, the server can continue to operate without data loss, and also wants to maximize read performance. Which of the following should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

RAID 1. RAID 1 mirrors data across two drives, providing fault tolerance if one drive fails and allowing read operations to be distributed across both drives for better performance. RAID 0 lacks redundancy, RAID 5 needs at least three drives, and RAID 10 needs at least four drives, so none of those meet the requirements with only two drives.

Answer

RAID 10

Answer

RAID 0

Answer

RAID 5

Question 9

A server administrator is configuring a new Windows Server 2022 file server. The server will host a share that must be accessible to both Windows and macOS clients. The administrator needs to ensure that file permissions are enforced consistently across both platforms. Which two of the following should the administrator implement? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Ensure that the macOS clients connect using SMB.. To enforce permissions consistently for both Windows and macOS clients, the administrator should use NTFS permissions, which are enforced by the server regardless of client OS, and ensure macOS clients connect via SMB. macOS supports SMB and will honor NTFS ACLs. ABE only affects visibility, SMB encryption only secures data in transit, and Services for Macintosh is obsolete.

Answer

Configure the share to use SMB 3.1.1 with encryption.

Answer

Install Services for Macintosh (SFM) on the server.

Answer

Enable Access-Based Enumeration (ABE) on the share.

Question 10

A company has a Windows Server 2022 server running Hyper-V. The server hosts a virtual machine (VM) that runs a database. The VM is configured with 16 GB of static memory. Users report that the database performance is slow during peak hours. The administrator notices that the Hyper-V host has 32 GB of RAM and is running three other VMs, each with 8 GB of static memory. The host is experiencing high memory pressure. Which of the following should the administrator implement to improve performance?

Accepted Answer

Add more physical RAM to the host.. The host is overallocated: 16 GB + 3*8 GB = 40 GB of static memory assigned, but only 32 GB physical. This causes high memory pressure and slow performance. Adding more physical RAM is the direct solution to eliminate the shortage.

Answer

Enable Hyper-V Replica for the database VM.

Answer

Configure a virtual NUMA topology for the database VM.

Answer

Enable Dynamic Memory on the database VM.

Question 11

A server administrator is configuring a new Windows Server 2022 server that will host a database. The database requires high write performance and low latency. The server has four 800 GB SSDs and a hardware RAID controller with a 2 GB battery-backed write cache. Which RAID level should the administrator choose to meet the performance requirements while providing redundancy?

Accepted Answer

RAID 10. RAID 10 provides both high write performance, due to its mirrored and striped design without parity overhead, and redundancy. RAID 5 and RAID 6 incur parity calculation overhead that reduces write performance, and RAID 0 lacks redundancy entirely, making it unsuitable for a database requiring fault tolerance.

Answer

RAID 0

Answer

RAID 5

Answer

RAID 6

Question 12

A system administrator is setting up a new server rack. The server has redundant power supplies. The administrator wants to ensure that the server remains operational if one power supply fails or if one power source fails. Which of the following should the administrator do?

Accepted Answer

Connect each power supply to a different PDU on separate circuits.. For redundant power supplies to be effective, they must be connected to separate power sources, such as different PDUs on different circuits. This ensures that a failure in one power path does not affect the other. Connecting both to the same PDU or circuit leaves a single point of failure.

Answer

Connect one power supply to a PDU and leave the other unplugged as a spare.

Answer

Connect both power supplies to the same PDU.

Answer

Connect both power supplies to the same circuit but different outlets.

Question 13

A server administrator is configuring a RAID array on a new server with six 4 TB SAS drives. The server will host a large email archive that requires maximum usable capacity and can tolerate the loss of up to two drives without data loss. Write performance is not critical, but read performance should be adequate. Which RAID level should the administrator choose?

Accepted Answer

RAID 6. RAID 6 provides dual parity, allowing the array to survive two simultaneous drive failures while offering usable capacity of n-2 drives. With six 4 TB drives, that yields 16 TB, which is greater than RAID 10's 12 TB. RAID 5 can only survive one failure, and RAID 0 offers no redundancy, so RAID 6 is the correct choice for this scenario.

Answer

RAID 0

Answer

RAID 5

Answer

RAID 10

Question 14

A Linux server running Ubuntu Server 22.04 hosts a PostgreSQL database. The administrator notices that the database performs well in the morning but becomes progressively slower throughout the day, and free memory drops steadily. Running free -h shows that available memory is nearly exhausted, but the swap partition is barely used. Which command should the administrator use to identify the process consuming the most memory?

Accepted Answer

top -o %MEM. The top command with the -o %MEM option sorts running processes by memory consumption, directly identifying the process responsible for the steady memory decline. Other tools like vmstat, iostat, and sar provide system-wide statistics but lack per-process detail. For a Linux server experiencing memory pressure, top is the most efficient first step to isolate the offending process.

Answer

vmstat 1 10

Answer

iostat -x 5

Answer

sar -r 1 5

Question 15

A server administrator is planning a storage configuration for a new database server that will handle a high volume of random writes. The server has eight 1.2 TB 10K RPM SAS drives and a hardware RAID controller with a 4 GB cache and battery backup. The administrator needs to maximize write performance while ensuring data redundancy. Which RAID level and configuration should the administrator implement?

Accepted Answer

RAID 10 with a stripe size of 256 KB. RAID 10 provides the best random write performance among the options because it uses mirroring and striping without parity overhead. Each write is written to two drives, avoiding the read-modify-write cycle of parity RAID. It also provides redundancy. RAID 5 and RAID 6 incur parity penalties, and RAID 0 lacks redundancy, so RAID 10 is the correct choice for a high-random-write database server.

Answer

RAID 5 with a stripe size of 64 KB

Answer

RAID 0 with a stripe size of 64 KB

Answer

RAID 6 with a stripe size of 128 KB