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220-1201 Practice Question: An IT administrator is planning to deploy…
An IT administrator is planning to deploy multiple virtual machines on a single host for a development team. Each developer needs a separate environment with different OS versions. The host has a quad-core CPU with hyper-threading enabled and 32 GB of RAM. The administrator wants to maximize resource utilization while ensuring performance isolation. Which virtualization feature should be configured?
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
✓
Resource pooling
Resource pooling allows the hypervisor to dynamically allocate CPU and memory from a shared pool to VMs as needed, balancing load and ensuring isolation. This is ideal for development environments where demand varies.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Virtual machine snapshots
Why it's wrong here
Virtual machine snapshots capture the entire operational state of a VM at a specific moment, including its running memory, disk data, and configuration. They are primarily utilized for creating restore points, enabling quick rollback to a previous state for testing, troubleshooting, or recovery from failed updates. However, snapshots do not provide mechanisms for allocating, managing, or isolating CPU and memory resources among multiple virtual machines; they are a data protection and rollback feature.
- ✓
Resource pooling
Why this is correct
Resource pooling aggregates physical CPU and memory from multiple hosts into a single logical pool, which the hypervisor then dynamically allocates to virtual machines as needed. This allows for flexible and efficient distribution of resources, ensuring that individual VMs receive adequate performance while preventing resource contention. It is crucial for managing multiple virtual machines by providing both performance isolation and the ability to scale resources without overcommitting or underutilizing physical hardware.
- ✗
Virtual switch VLAN tagging
Why it's wrong here
Virtual switch VLAN tagging, based on the IEEE 802.1Q standard, is a networking technique used to logically segment network traffic within a virtualized environment. It allows multiple virtual networks to coexist on a single physical network interface, enhancing security and organizing broadcast domains. However, VLAN tagging exclusively deals with network traffic isolation and segmentation; it has no direct function in managing, allocating, or isolating CPU or memory resources for virtual machines.
- ✗
Virtual machine cloning
Why it's wrong here
Virtual machine cloning involves creating an exact, identical copy of an existing virtual machine, including its operating system, applications, and configuration files. This process is highly beneficial for rapidly deploying new VMs from a standardized template or for creating multiple instances of a specific server configuration. While cloning facilitates the creation of multiple virtual machines, it does not inherently manage or allocate CPU and memory resources or provide performance isolation for the cloned instances once they are deployed.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on 220-1201
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A small business runs a single physical server hosting three virtual machines (VMs) for file sharing, database, and email. The server has 32 GB of RAM, and each VM is allocated 8 GB. Users report that the file-sharing VM is extremely slow. The hypervisor shows the host has 4 GB of RAM free. Which of the following is the most likely cause of the performance issue?
medium- A.The hypervisor is not configured to use hardware-assisted virtualization.
- B.The file-sharing VM’s virtual hard disk is stored on a slow USB 2.0 external drive.
- ✓ C.The file-sharing VM has been allocated insufficient RAM and is experiencing memory ballooning.
- D.The network switch port for the server is set to half-duplex.
Why C: The total allocated RAM for VMs (24 GB) is less than the physical RAM (32 GB), so it's not strictly memory overcommitment in terms of allocation. However, the host only has 4 GB of RAM free. If the file-sharing VM's actual memory demands exceed its allocated 8 GB, or if the combined active working sets of all VMs and the hypervisor exceed the available physical RAM, the hypervisor will be forced to use techniques like swapping to disk or memory ballooning to reclaim memory. Both of these processes are extremely slow and would cause the reported performance issues for the file-sharing VM. This is a common virtualization performance bottleneck when a VM is starved for memory.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 220-1201 practice question is part of Courseiva's free CompTIA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 220-1201 exam.