Select Two (Multi-Select) Questions

HotAdd mode (attaching virtual disks to a backup proxy virtual machine)

Correct. HotAdd mode mounts backup target disks directly to a proxy VM for fast reads.

SAN mode (direct block access to storage via Fibre Channel or iSCSI HBAs)

Correct. SAN mode reads data directly from storage hardware without consuming ESXi network bandwidth.

NBD / NBDSSL mode (Network Block Device streaming over TCP/IP)

NBD mode reads disk data over the ESXi management network via network sockets.

Local OS users (local vpxuser / local system accounts)

Correct. Local accounts and local OS users are supported for bootstrapping and emergency access.

Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication or Active Directory over LDAP)

Correct. Active Directory is a primary supported identity source for enterprise SSO.

OpenLDAP directory services

Correct. OpenLDAP is supported as an LDAP identity source in vCenter SSO.

Reserving 100% of guest virtual machine memory to prevent swapping and ballooning overhead

Correct. 100% memory reservation guarantees physical RAM allocation and eliminates hypervisor memory reclamation overhead.

Enabling Large Pages (Transparent Huge Pages / 2MB pages) to reduce TLB miss overhead

Correct. Large pages reduce Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) pressure and improve memory access speeds.

Sizing virtual machine memory to fit within physical NUMA node boundaries

Correct. Staying within NUMA boundaries prevents cross-socket remote memory access latency penalties.

Shares

Correct. Shares determine relative priority when resource contention occurs.

Limit

Correct. Limits cap the maximum amount of resources a VM can consume.

Reservation

Correct. Reservations guarantee a minimum amount of CPU or memory resources.

Leave virtual machines powered on

Correct. Leaving VMs powered on ensures continuous local execution if isolation is temporary.

Power off virtual machines

Correct. Powered off VMs can then be restarted on surviving healthy cluster hosts.

Network heartbeats exchanged between Master and Slave ESXi hosts

Correct. Network heartbeats are the primary method of detecting host failures.

Datastore heartbeats written to shared storage datastores

Correct. Datastore heartbeats determine if a silent host is truly dead or just experiencing a network partition.

Storage reachability checks verifying active path status

Correct. HA monitors storage datastore accessibility as part of its failure detection framework.

Storage vMotion (migrating virtual disk files between datastores without downtime)

Correct. Storage vMotion migrates VMDK storage files across datastores while powered on.

Enhanced vMotion (migrating both compute host and storage datastore simultaneously)

Correct. Enhanced vMotion combines compute and storage migration in a single operation.

vMotion (migrating compute execution across hosts without downtime)

Correct. vMotion migrates running VMs across ESXi hosts.

vSphere HA requires a minimum of two ESXi hosts in the cluster to provide failover capability.

A minimum of two hosts is required so that failed VMs on one host can be restarted on another.

Datastore heartbeating is used to distinguish between a host network partition and a host power failure.

Datastore heartbeats help prevent split-brain scenarios by confirming host status when management network communication fails.

MAC Address Changes

Correct. MAC Address Changes is a configurable security policy setting on vSwitch port groups.

Promiscuous Mode

Correct. Promiscuous Mode is a configurable security policy setting on vSwitch port groups.

NFS client

Correct. NFS client has a dedicated built-in firewall rule in ESXi.

SSH (Secure Shell)

Correct. SSH has a dedicated built-in firewall rule in ESXi.

Redundant, high-bandwidth inter-site ISL (Inter-Switch Links) for vMotion and storage traffic.

Correct. High bandwidth is mandatory to handle continuous cross-site replication and migrations.

Placement of the vSAN Witness node in a third independent failure domain or site.

Correct. A third site prevents split-brain conditions if an inter-site link fails.

Strict round-trip time (RTT) latency limitations between the primary data centers (typically <= 5ms for vSAN).

Correct. Synchronous replication requires low RTT latency to prevent I/O stalls.

Deduplication and Compression

Correct. Deduplication and compression reduce storage capacity consumption on supported vSAN tiers.

Encryption (Data-at-Rest Encryption)

Correct. vSAN supports native encryption of all datastore objects at rest using KMIP keys.

Checksum (automatic integrity checking and self-healing)

Correct. vSAN computes checksums for data blocks and automatically repairs corrupted blocks.

Compliance with maximum vCPU limits supported by the specific vSphere FT release

Correct. FT has strict vCPU count limitations per virtual machine to maintain deterministic instruction synchronization.

Dedicated FT logging VMkernel adapters configured on participating ESXi hosts

Correct. FT continuous replication streams require dedicated high-bandwidth network adapters.

Shared storage accessible simultaneously by both primary and secondary host nodes

Correct. Both primary and secondary VMs must access the same underlying virtual disk files on shared storage.

The 'Troubleshooting' tab and metric correlation charts to compare latency, IOPS, ready time, and packet drops across objects.

Metric correlation allows administrators to overlay metrics from different layers to pinpoint root causes.

The 'Stress' and 'Risk' badges to identify workloads experiencing resource contention or impending capacity shortfalls.

Stress and Risk badges highlight current performance bottlenecks and future capacity exhaustion risks.

Capacity remaining and Time-to-Remaining projections for CPU, memory, and storage datastores.

Capacity projections show exactly when resources will be depleted based on historical usage trends.

CPU utilization

CPU load is a primary metric evaluated by DRS when placing or migrating virtual machines.

Active memory utilization

DRS monitors active memory usage to determine actual memory pressure on hosts during balancing evaluations.

A reservation guarantees that a resource pool receives at least the specified amount of compute power regardless of total contention.

Reservations guarantee minimum resource allocations.

Shares determine the priority of resource allocation when a resource pool competes for resources with sibling pools.

Shares dictate relative priority during resource contention.

A limit restricts the maximum amount of resource that a resource pool or its child virtual machines can consume.

Limits cap maximum consumption.

Identity Providers such as Active Directory, OpenID Connect, and LDAP integrated via vCenter Single Sign-On.

vCenter SSO integrates with external identity sources for user authentication.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) mapping users and groups to specific permissions and roles.

RBAC assigns permissions linking users to roles across inventory objects.

The processor must support 64-bit x86 execution with hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) enabled in the BIOS.

Hardware virtualization support in the CPU/BIOS is mandatory for ESXi 9.0.

A minimum of 8 GB of physical RAM is required for standard ESXi deployment.

ESXi requires at least 8 GB of physical RAM to install and run.

The destination datastore must have sufficient free capacity to accommodate the virtual machine's thick-provisioned or thin-provisioned footprint.

Space validation is mandatory; insufficient free space causes the migration task to fail immediately.

Both the source and destination hosts must have active storage accessibility (paths) to both datastores during the migration phase.

During Storage vMotion, the host reads from the source and writes to the destination simultaneously, requiring paths to both datastores.

The VM must not have snapshot files larger than 2TB if using older VMFS versions, and disk formats must be supported.

Snapshot chains and disk configurations must be supported by the migration engine (e.g., physical RDMs cannot be migrated without converting to VMDK).

%RUN (Percentage of time scheduled on a physical CPU)

%RUN indicates how much CPU time the world was actively running on physical cores.

%USED (Percentage of physical CPU used)

%USED shows the actual physical CPU resources consumed by the world (VM).