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220-1201 Practice Question: A company uses virtual machines for its…
A company uses virtual machines for its production environment. A technician needs to perform maintenance on the host server without disrupting the VMs. The technician wants to move the VMs to another host in the cluster while they are running. Which feature must be configured to allow this?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Live migration (vMotion)
Live migration (vMotion in VMware, live migration in Hyper-V) allows moving running VMs between hosts with zero downtime. This is a key feature for high availability and maintenance. The correct answer directly names this feature.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Virtual machine snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Virtual machine snapshots capture the entire state of a VM, including its memory, settings, and disk data, at a specific point in time. While useful for creating restore points or testing changes, they do not facilitate moving a running VM from one physical host to another. A snapshot is essentially a backup mechanism for rollback, not a migration tool for live operations.
- ✓
Live migration (vMotion)
Why this is correct
Live migration, often implemented as vMotion in VMware environments, is a crucial virtualization technology that allows a running virtual machine to be moved from one physical host to another without any interruption to its operation. This process seamlessly transfers the VM's active memory and CPU state, along with its storage, between hosts. It is precisely what a technician needs to perform maintenance or balance loads on production servers without downtime.
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Virtual switch trunking
Why it's wrong here
Virtual switch trunking is a networking configuration that enables a single physical network port or virtual port group to carry traffic for multiple Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs). This is essential for segmenting network traffic within a virtual environment and connecting VMs to different logical networks. However, trunking is purely a network configuration feature and has no direct function in the physical relocation or migration of a virtual machine itself.
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Resource pooling
Why it's wrong here
Resource pooling is a virtualization feature that allows administrators to aggregate the CPU and memory resources of multiple physical hosts into a single logical pool. This pool can then be used to allocate resources to virtual machines or other resource pools, facilitating efficient resource management and load balancing within a cluster. While it helps manage resource allocation, resource pooling does not inherently move virtual machines between hosts; it only defines how resources are distributed among them.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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