Sunday, 24 November 2013

VxVM interview questions

1)    Can you reduce a FS in VxVM ? What is the risk involved ?
There are a few risks and issues involved while reducing a Filesystem in VxVM.
1.1)    UFS volumes  cannot be shrunk, only grow operation is permitted.
1.2)    VxFS volumes  must be mounted for grow and shrink operation, if it is unmounted no operation can be performed
1.3)    You cannot resize a volume that contains plexes with different layout types ( e.g concat and stripe). Attempting to do so results in the following error message:
              VxVM vxresize ERROR V-5-1-2536 Volume volume has different
               organization in each mirror
 

To resize such a volume successfully, you must first reconfigure it so that each data plex has the same layout type.

2)    What is the role of vxconfigd daemon ?
vxconfigd daemon handles all configuration management tasks for VxVM objects. It maintains disk and disk group configuration details, communicates configuration changes to the kernel, and modifies the persistent configuration information stored on disks
 vxconfigd provides the interface between VxVM commands and the kernel device drivers.
 vxconfigd handles   configuration change requests from VxVM utilities, communicates the change requests  to the VxVM kernel, and modifies configuration information stored on disk.
 vxconfigd also initializes VxVM when the system is booted.
 

So practically any command which changes the configuration of VxVM objects (plexes, volumes) interact with vxconfigd daemon.

3)    Where is the diskgroup configuration information is stored in VxVM ?
The DG configuration info is stored in /etc/vx/cbr/bk directory. Last 5 configuration changes are stored.


4)    What is stored in privlen of a VxVM disk ? Do all the disks of a diskgroup have the same information in their private region ?
The private region of a vxvm disk stores disk header label and configuration information about vxvm objects such as volumes,plexes and sub disks.
 

Yes, each  disk in a diskgroup stores an entire copy of the configuration information.

5)    Can you import a DG with incomplete set of disks ?
Yes, If some of the disks in a Diskgroup have failed , you can import the DG using –f option
# vxdg –f import diskgroup


6) How will you replace a faulty disk in VxVM ?
A disk which has failed can be seen from the output of vxdisk list command. The disk device ctd will be missing from the output and it can be seen as failed was :c#t#d#. This confirms that the disk has indeed failed.
We can use vxdiskadm menu options to replace the faulted disk. Choose option 5 from the men , then list the failed disk using 'list' option. We would have to choose an alternate disk for the replacement. The list of available disks is also shown by vxdiskadm. Press 'y' and complete the replacement activity.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

Solaris Interview Questions

1) Can you reduce a FS in VxVM ? What is the risk involved ?
2) What are branded zones in solaris ?
3) What is the main enhancement in NFS v4 over v3 ?
4) How can we refresh automount config without affecting connected users ?
5) How many types of automount maps are there ?
6) How can you patch a solaris zone which is a sparse root ?

7) What is the difference between zone and container in Solaris ?
8) How can we assign zpool to NGZ ?
9) How thin provisioning / sparse volume is created in ZFS ?


10) Suppose after a power outage or a mistake by storage admin, one of your LUN in VxVM was unavailable and now it has become available again. But your mountpoint is throwing I/O error. How will you resolve this situation ?
11) What are the advantages of using ZFS instead of UFS ?
12) Which is better hardware  RAID or software RAID ? why ?
13) After a power outage or kernel panic ZFS pool is not getting imported ? What are the steps for troubleshooting this ?
14) Which virtualization solution would you recommend to customer LDOM or zones ? under what scenario and considerations ?
15) Suppose you have a low memory condition on solaris server . How will you troubleshoot further ?
16) What is the change in regards to network configuration in Solaris 10 over Solaris 8 ?

17) How can you restore LDOM configuration ?
18) How can we clone LDOM ?
19) Which field of iostat indicates a IO bottleneck ? What are the important metrics to be looked at in iostat output ?
20) In maintaining Solaris security what are the common steps / procedures followed by System Admins ?
21) In Solaris we have resource pools ( rpool ). We can assign rpools to zones as well to set cpu shares. Then why do we need resource controls in zones ( add rctl ) . What is the advantage of using resource controls when resource pooling is already there ?
22) How to install multiple patches in a single patchadd invocation ?