Storage
Free VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (vSphere 8) practice — 6 questions on Storage, with explanations. No sign-up. Full 12-question mixed test →
A vSphere 8 administrator wants automatic space reclamation (UNMAP) on a VMFS-6 datastore to reclaim deleted blocks as fast as possible, accepting the additional host I/O overhead this causes. Which reclamation priority setting, available starting in vSphere 8, should be configured?
vSphere 8 expanded VMFS6 automatic space reclamation priorities to None, Low, Medium, and High. High issues UNMAP commands most aggressively/fastest, reclaiming space quickest at the cost of more backend I/O.
A company presents an ALUA-compliant active/passive storage array to an ESXi 8 cluster over Fibre Channel. Which Native Multipathing Plug-in Path Selection Policy is recommended by VMware to balance I/O across the active controller's paths while avoiding path thrashing?
For ALUA-capable arrays, VMware recommends Round Robin because it load-balances I/O across the active/optimized paths reported by the array while still respecting ALUA state, avoiding the thrashing risk that Fixed can cause on active/passive arrays.
A vSAN storage policy is configured with 'Failures to Tolerate' set to 2 using RAID-6 (Erasure Coding) for space efficiency. What is the minimum number of hosts contributing storage that the vSAN cluster must have to satisfy this policy?
RAID-6 erasure coding with FTT=2 requires 4 data segments plus 2 parity segments, needing a minimum of 6 hosts in the cluster (each hosting one component) to satisfy the policy.
A VM is deployed using a storage policy with a tag-based placement rule requiring the datastore to have the tag 'Gold'. After deployment, the administrator removes the 'Gold' tag from the datastore hosting the VM's disks. What happens to the VM as a result?
SPBM continuously evaluates compliance but does not automatically move VMs. Removing the tag causes the policy check to fail, changing the compliance status to noncompliant; the administrator must manually trigger remediation (e.g., Storage vMotion) to restore compliance.
In a Virtual Volumes (vVols) architecture, which component acts as the data access point between ESXi hosts and the storage array, eliminating the need to present traditional LUNs for per-VM I/O?
The Protocol Endpoint is the logical I/O proxy the array exposes to ESXi hosts; all vVol data traffic flows through the PE, which binds/unbinds vVols on demand instead of requiring a dedicated LUN per VM.
An administrator wants to increase throughput to a single NFS 4.1 datastore by allowing ESXi to establish multiple TCP connections to the NFS server for the same mount. Which NFS 4.1 feature, requiring support on both ESXi and the NFS server, enables this behavior?
NFS 4.1 in vSphere supports session trunking, which allows multiple IP addresses/connections (paths) to be used for a single NFS 4.1 session, providing multipathing and increased throughput/resiliency — this requires the NFS server to also support session trunking.
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