I’ll assume you read the first post in the series.
Virtual Machines 1
Things to note:
- “Another administrator has already started by creating the VM” = Don’t make a new one and don’t delete the existing one.
- “using any means necessary” = There is troubleshooting involved.
- “Create a text file on the student desktop containing the information required to identify this virtual machine’s storage traffic on the production FCP network.” = You need to figure out what vSphere feature solves this business need.
Step 1: Check DB
Ok, so DB only has one CPU.
No problem, we’ll just add another.
Oops. We’re only allowed one CPU.
Ok, so maybe the host only has one CPU.
Nope, host has 2.
Ok, so if the host is capable, what would restrict the VM from being allocated as many CPUs or cores as the host has?
Two possibilities: VM hardware version and VM Operating System selection.
The issue isn’t VM HW version (you’d need to go back to pre-SMP-support days to hit a max of 1) so lets check the OS selected.
Found the problem. Some joker picked Win98 which will limit the VM to 1 CPU and 2GB of RAM plus if the VM was created on an older version of vSphere it will have IDE hard drives.
Step 2: Fix OS setting and increase CPU to 2
Step 3: Research
Ok so we need a vSphere feature that will identify specific VM traffic on a FCP network. Normally any FCP storage traffic will get the host’s WWN attached. Meaning all VM traffic will look the same.
We need something that will uniquely identify this VMs traffic regardless of the host it’s on (since we don’t know which prod host it will be placed on).
Searching “virtual machine WWN” in the vSphere docs pops a reference to configuring NPIV as the third match.
“This capability lets you control virtual machine access to LUNs on a per-virtual machine basis.” ok, perfect
“NPIV is supported only for virtual machines with RDM disks.” Hey, some joker didn’t make RDM disks on the VM we are working on! This won’t actually work!
Yeah, sorry about that. A correct solution would include the VM having an RDM or you adding an RDP or text about “RDM will be added”. I used this as a talking point for candidates working with TT.
Step 3: Enable NPIV on the VM
Uncheck “Temporarily disable” (which is an interesting choice for a description since it’s the default and 99.999% of installs never change it) and select “Generate New” then close and reopen settings.
Step 3: Copy and paste the WWN to a text file on the desktop.
Scoring:
Two CPUs for DB?
if ((get-vm db).numcpu -eq 2) {$one = 1}
WWN file on the desktop?
$found = dir "C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop" | select-string -pattern "\w\w:\w\w:\w\w:\w\w:\w\w:\w\w:\w\w:\w\w"
if ($found.length -ge 1) {$two = 1;$three = 1}
This one only had two scoring points. You might look here for my take on how performance based exams are scored.
