100 Essential Virtualization Concepts

1. What is virtualization?Answer: Virtualization is the process of simulating hardware resources through software, abstracting physical devices into multiple virtual instances, enabling flexible allocation and isolation of resources.2. What are the core advantages of virtualization?Answer: It enhances hardware utilization, reduces operational costs, simplifies resource deployment, and supports rapid migration and disaster recovery.3. What are the common types of virtualization?Answer: Server virtualization, desktop virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization, and application virtualization.4. What is a Hypervisor?Answer: A virtualization management program responsible for creating, running, and managing virtual machines, which can be classified into bare-metal (Type 1) and hosted (Type 2).5. What is the difference between a Virtual Machine (VM) and a physical machine?Answer: A virtual machine simulates hardware through software, sharing physical resources and allowing flexible migration; a physical machine is an independent hardware entity.6. What are typical scenarios for server virtualization?Answer: Data center consolidation, cloud computing platform setup, test environment isolation, and business disaster recovery backup.7. What is a vCPU?Answer: A virtual CPU within a virtual machine, allocated by the physical CPU through the Hypervisor.8. How is memory virtualization achieved?Answer: The Hypervisor manages virtual machine memory mapping through shadow page tables, enabling resource allocation.9. What is the role of storage virtualization?Answer: It integrates scattered storage devices into a unified resource pool, supporting dynamic allocation, snapshot backups, and failover.10. What are the core technologies of network virtualization?Answer: Virtual switches (vSwitch), virtual routers, VLAN segmentation, and SDN (Software Defined Networking).11. What are the advantages of desktop virtualization (VDI)?Answer: Centralized management of terminal environments, cloud storage of data, and support for seamless switching across multiple devices with secure control.12. What is container virtualization?Answer: Virtualization based on the operating system layer, isolating application runtime environments through container engines (such as Docker).13. What is the difference between containers and virtual machines?Answer: Containers share the host kernel, start quickly and are lightweight; virtual machines simulate complete hardware and have higher resource consumption.14. What is resource overcommitment in virtualization?Answer: Allocating physical resources proportionally to multiple virtual machines (e.g., overcommitting vCPUs) to enhance utilization while balancing performance.15. What is live migration?Answer: The process of migrating a virtual machine from one physical server to another without downtime, maintaining business continuity.16. Where might performance bottlenecks occur in virtualization?Answer: I/O throughput, CPU scheduling delays, insufficient memory bandwidth, and overhead from network virtualization.17. What are the functions of a virtual switch?Answer: It connects virtual machines to the physical network, supporting VLAN segmentation, traffic control, and security policy configuration.18. What types of RAID are used in storage virtualization?Answer: RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 5 (distributed parity), etc., chosen based on needs.19. What is QoS (Quality of Service)?Answer: Allocating priority resources (such as bandwidth, CPU) to virtual machines to ensure performance for critical business operations.20. What are the security risks in a virtualization environment?Answer: VM escape attacks, resource abuse, data leakage from shared storage, and vulnerabilities in the Hypervisor.21. How to monitor virtual machine performance?Answer: By using management platforms to view CPU/memory/disk utilization, network traffic, and resource contention.22. What is a virtual machine template?Answer: A pre-configured virtual machine image with an operating system and software, used for quickly cloning new instances.23. How is high availability (HA) achieved in virtualization?Answer: Automatically migrating virtual machines to healthy nodes during failures, relying on shared storage and heartbeat detection.24. What is nested virtualization?Answer: Running a virtualization environment within a virtual machine, commonly used for testing and development scenarios.25. What protocols are used in desktop virtualization?Answer: RDP (Microsoft), PCoIP (VMware), SPICE (Red Hat), etc., affecting image quality and latency.26. What are container orchestration tools?Answer: Tools like Kubernetes, used for automating the deployment, scaling, and recovery of container clusters.27. How is license management handled in virtualization?Answer: Licensing based on the number of physical CPU cores, virtual machines, or users, requiring compliant allocation.28. What is NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access)?Answer: Optimizing memory access efficiency in multi-CPU architectures to reduce cross-node latency.29. What types of virtual disks are there?Answer: Thick provisioned (pre-allocated space), thin provisioned (dynamically expanded), and differential disks (incremental based on templates).30. What is VxLAN in network virtualization?Answer: A tunneling protocol that extends the number of VLANs to 16 million, supporting communication across physical networks.31. What are the backup methods for virtualization?Answer: Full machine snapshots, incremental backups, and application-consistent backups (using interfaces like VMware VADP).32. What is SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization)?Answer: Directly assigning physical network cards to virtual machines, bypassing the Hypervisor to enhance I/O performance.33. What is the relationship between containers and microservices?Answer: Containers are lightweight execution environments for microservices, facilitating independent deployment, updates, and scaling.34. What are the resource scheduling strategies in virtualization environments?Answer: Dynamic load balancing, resource reservation, and priority-based CPU/memory allocation.35. What is vMotion?Answer: VMware’s live migration technology that supports migrating virtual machines across clusters while retaining their state.36. What is the difference between NAS and SAN in storage virtualization?Answer: NAS shares based on file systems, while SAN provides block-level storage, with the latter offering higher performance but at a higher cost.37. What is a thin client in desktop virtualization?Answer: Low-power terminal devices that only handle display and input, with computing and storage done in the cloud.38. What are the key points for compatibility testing in virtualization?Answer: Compatibility of hardware (CPU/network card), operating systems, drivers, and third-party software.39. What are Namespaces and Cgroups in containers?Answer: Namespaces isolate resources (such as network, file systems), while Cgroups limit resource usage (CPU/memory).40. What is the role of port groups in virtual switches?Answer: They define different network policies (such as VLAN, security rules) and bind virtual machine network cards.41. What are the disaster recovery solutions for virtualization?Answer: Active-active setups in the same city, remote disaster recovery, asynchronous replication (higher RPO), and synchronous replication (RPO≈0).42. What is overcommitment?Answer: Allocating virtual resources that exceed the total physical resources (such as memory overcommitment), relying on dynamic reclamation mechanisms.43. What are the tiered technologies in storage virtualization?Answer: Storing data in tiers based on access frequency (SSD/HDD/tape), reducing costs and improving performance.44. How is firewall deployment handled in network virtualization?Answer: Distributed firewalls (DFW) are deployed at the virtual machine level to achieve fine-grained traffic control.45. What is offline mode in desktop virtualization?Answer: Caching virtual machines to local storage, allowing them to run even when disconnected, with data synchronized upon reconnection.46. What is a container image repository?Answer: A central repository for storing container images (such as Docker Hub, Harbor), supporting version management and distribution.47. What are the performance optimization tools for virtualization?Answer: VMware ESXTOP, Nmon, Prometheus (for container monitoring), etc.48. What is DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler)?Answer: Automatically balances virtual machine resources within a cluster, dynamically migrating or adjusting configurations based on load.49. What are the risks of snapshot rollback in storage virtualization?Answer: Potential loss of data changes after the rollback point, requiring careful operation and backup of critical data.50. How is DHCP service configured in virtual networks?Answer: Setting up IP address pools, lease times, and gateways on virtual switches or routers to allocate to virtual machines.51. What is redirection technology in desktop virtualization?Answer: Mapping local devices (USB, printers) to virtual machines for cross-environment usage.52. What is the health check mechanism for containers?Answer: Kubernetes uses Liveness probes and Readiness probes to check the status of containers.53. What is hardware passthrough (PCI Passthrough) in virtualization?Answer: Directly assigning physical devices (GPU, network cards) to virtual machines, bypassing the Hypervisor to enhance performance.54. What is tiered management of resource pools?Answer: Dividing resource pools by department or business, setting independent quotas and permissions for isolation and control.55. What is vSAN (Virtual SAN)?Answer: VMware’s distributed storage technology that aggregates physical machine disks to create a unified storage resource pool.56. What is a load balancer in network virtualization?Answer: Tools like HAProxy and Nginx that distribute traffic to multiple virtual machine instances, enhancing service availability.57. What is personalized configuration in desktop virtualization?Answer: Saving user desktop settings and synchronizing them across terminals through User Profile or FSLogix.58. What is the Sidecar pattern in containers?Answer: Running auxiliary containers (such as for logging or monitoring) alongside the main container, sharing network and storage.59. What is compliance auditing in virtualization?Answer: Recording virtual machine operation logs and resource usage to meet data security and regulatory requirements.60. What are DRS Affinity Rules?Answer: Setting affinity/anti-affinity rules for virtual machines and physical hosts to control deployment locations.61. What is deduplication in storage virtualization?Answer: Identifying and removing redundant data blocks to save storage space and improve storage utilization.62. What is an ACL (Access Control List) in virtual networks?Answer: Defining traffic policies between virtual machines, allowing or denying access to specific protocols and ports.63. What is GPU virtualization in desktop virtualization?Answer: Allocating graphical processing capabilities to virtual machines using technologies like NVIDIA GRID, supporting design or rendering tasks.64. What is a Service Mesh for containers?Answer: Adding a transparent network management layer to container applications, enabling traffic control, circuit breaking, and monitoring.65. What is the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for virtualization?Answer: A list of hardware certified by vendors to ensure stable compatibility with virtualization platforms.66. What is the difference between resource reservation and limits?Answer: Reservation guarantees a minimum amount of resources, while limits prevent overuse, balancing resource fairness.67. What is vCenter Server?Answer: VMware’s centralized management platform for monitoring, configuring, and automating the lifecycle of virtual machines.68. What is GRE tunneling in network virtualization?Answer: Encapsulating IP packets to traverse heterogeneous networks, extending the coverage of virtual networks.69. What is session virtualization (RDS) in desktop virtualization?Answer: Multiple users sharing a single Windows server session, suitable for lightweight office scenarios.70. What are the types of volumes in containers?Answer: EmptyDir (temporary storage), HostPath (host directory mapping), PersistentVolume (persistent storage).71. What are the alarm threshold settings for virtualization?Answer: Configuring alarm trigger conditions for CPU/memory usage, disk space, etc., based on business needs.72. What is HA Admission Control?Answer: Setting a resource reservation ratio for the cluster to ensure resources are available to start HA virtual machines during failures.73. What is the iSCSI protocol in storage virtualization?Answer: Transmitting SCSI commands over IP networks for block-level storage access, at a lower cost than FC protocols.74. What is STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) in virtual networks?Answer: Preventing network loops by dynamically blocking redundant links to ensure network connectivity.75. What are the user experience optimizations in desktop virtualization?Answer: Optimizing image compression algorithms, reducing latency, enabling audio redirection, and USB passthrough.76. What is the Pod concept in containers?Answer: The smallest deployable unit in Kubernetes, which can contain multiple containers sharing resources.77. What are hardware-assisted technologies in virtualization?Answer: Instruction sets like Intel VT-x and AMD-V that accelerate CPU virtualization performance.78. What are resource shares in resource pools?Answer: Proportionally allocating resources (such as CPU shares), with higher priority virtual machines receiving more resources.79. What is a vMotion Network?Answer: A dedicated high-speed network that carries memory and state data transfer during virtual machine live migration.80. What is a VxLAN gateway in network virtualization?Answer: A device that connects virtual networks to physical networks, encapsulating and decapsulating VxLAN packets.81. What is Local Mode in desktop virtualization?Answer: Caching virtual machines to local hard drives, allowing them to run offline, suitable for offline scenarios.82. What is the Helm package manager for containers?Answer: Simplifying application deployment in Kubernetes, managing chart versions and dependencies.83. What is the resource reclamation mechanism in virtualization?Answer: Automatically releasing idle virtual machine resources or shutting down inactive instances based on policies.84. What is FT (Fault Tolerance)?Answer: Creating a real-time mirrored copy of a virtual machine, allowing seamless switching during failures, with RTO≈0.85. What is Thin Provisioning in storage virtualization?Answer: Allocating storage space on demand to avoid resource waste, but requiring monitoring of actual usage to prevent overflow.86. What is VLAN Trunking in virtual networks?Answer: Allowing multiple VLANs to be transmitted over a single link, requiring appropriate tag configuration.87. What is virtual printing technology in desktop virtualization?Answer: Redirecting print jobs to local printers, supporting cross-platform printing (e.g., Windows to Linux).88. What is the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler in containers?Answer: Automatically scaling the number of Pods based on CPU/memory load, responding elastically to traffic changes.89. What are the limitations of hardware passthrough in virtualization?Answer: Devices are highly exclusive, cannot be shared, and require hardware and driver support.90. What is dynamic expansion of resource pools?Answer: Automatically incorporating new physical machines or cloud resources when resources are insufficient, expanding the capacity of resource pools.91. What is NSX (Network Virtualization Platform)?Answer: VMware’s SDN solution that automates network policy and micro-segmentation.92. What is traffic mirroring in network virtualization?Answer: Copying virtual machine network traffic to analysis tools (such as IDS/IPS) for monitoring and security detection.93. What are roaming profiles in desktop virtualization?Answer: Automatically loading personalized settings when users log in, maintaining a consistent experience across terminals.94. What is the Secret object in containers?Answer: Storing sensitive information (such as passwords, certificates) securely for access by containers.95. What are the energy-saving strategies in virtualization?Answer: Dynamically shutting down idle hosts, adjusting CPU turbo frequency, and optimizing fan speeds to reduce energy consumption.96. What is Storage vMotion?Answer: Migrating the storage location of a virtual machine (e.g., from HDD to SSD) without interrupting business operations.97. What is multipathing technology in storage virtualization?Answer: Transmitting data through multiple links to enhance performance and prevent single points of failure.98. What is QoS marking (DSCP) in virtual networks?Answer: Setting priorities for data packets to ensure the transmission quality of critical traffic (such as voice and video).99. What is App Streaming in desktop virtualization?Answer: Dynamically pushing applications to terminals without local installation, reducing resource consumption.100. What is the DaemonSet controller in containers?Answer: Ensuring that a specific container instance runs on every node, commonly used for global services like monitoring and logging.

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