Daniel Petri’s MCSE & System Administrator Interview Questions – Part 8 – Windows Server 2008/R2 Hyper-V and Virtualization

This is a part 8 of my MCSE and System Administrator job interview sample questions. See previous parts at:


Like previous parts, this article set is targeted at both the interviewer (who needs a pool of valid questions they can ask) and to the candidate (who wants a pool of sample questions they can prepare for). Needless to say, both MUST know what they’re talking about. Although I consider these questions as a thorough verbal test for the candidate’s knowledge, in most cases, when he or she passes this phase I will also ask them to perform an actual hands-on lab based on my written exercises. I might also include these in a future part of this session.
I have deliberately left out the answers to these questions. I want YOU to research them and take the time to actually learn these topics if you don’t know them already.
Most sub topics start off with relatively easy questions where the candidate is supposed to demonstrate their knowledge on that topic. A few sentences will be enough to show their (lack of) knowledge on the topic.
As always, your comments and feedback are more than welcome. Use the “Comment” form below to send them in. If you’re using this interview question sample in your own environment please drop me a line telling me how it works for you.

Technical Interview Questions – Windows Server 2008/R2 Hyper-V and Virtualization

  • What is virtualization (in general)?
  • What are the 4 major virtualization areas?
  • Describe the major benefits of Server Virtualization.
  • What is the difference between hosted virtualization and hypervisor-based virtualization?
  • What’s the idea behind Type 1 and Type 2 methods of virtualization?
  • Talk briefly about the history of Microsoft-based virtualization products.
  • What is Hyper-V?
  • Name a few competitive products that can be compared (even roughly) with Hyper-V.
  • What are the major differences between Hyper-V RTM and Hyper-V R2? Name some of the major differences.
  • What are the hardware requirements for Hyper-V?
  • How many logical CPUs does Hyper-V R2 support?
  • How much RAM can be assigned to VMs in Hyper-V R2?
  • What’s Microsoft Hyper-V Server?
  • Describe the process of installing Hyper-V from scratch on a brand new Dell R710 machine.
  • What types of network connections does Hyper-V allow?
  • When building a new Hyper-V host, what would your networking considerations be?
  • Why is it important to leave one physical NIC for the host OS?
  • Talk about MAC address ranges and potential issues with Hyper-V RTM. How was this solved in R2?
  • What are the different virtual disk options in Hyper-V?
  • When considering performance, what type 0f virtual disk would you use?
  • What are pass-through disks?
  • Talk about hot adding and hot removing disks in Hyper-V R2.
  • What are VM snapshots?
  • Talk about performance considerations and other “issues” with VM snapshots.
  • What’s the difference between applying, deleting and reverting to snapshots?
  • Describe the process of creating a new VM from scratch.
  • Where does Hyper-V place the files and settings for VMs, by default? How do you change that?
  • What are synthetic drivers?
  • What are emulated drivers?
  • When creating a new VM that’ll run Windows Server 2008, what type of NIC would you create?
  • Following the previous question, what type of NIC would you create for a WIN PE-based VM? Why?
  • Migrating a Windows Server 2003 VM from Virtual Server 2005, what type of NIC would you need to use?
  • Creating a new VM, what type of disk controller would you need to use for the VM’s system disk?
  • What are Integration Components?
  • Talk about certain issues with hosting DCs virtually.
  • What are “Enlightened Partitions”?
  • What OSs are supported on Hyper-V?
  • What types of backups can you use for VMs?
  • Talk about performing backups of VMs and VSS.
  • How do you export a VM? Mention a couple of methods.
  • Talk about domain membership considerations for Hyper-V hosts.
  • Where can you manage Hyper-V hosts from?
  • What is RSAT?
  • How would you manage Hyper-V from a Windows 7-based machine?
  • Talk about permission issues in regards of managing Hyper-V hosts.
  • What is AZMAN?
  • Talk about the licensing benefits of Hyper-V under the various editions of Windows Server 2008.
  • Wanting to create a failover cluster on 2 Hyper-V nodes in Windows Server 2008 R2, what edition of Windows would you prefer? Why?
  • Talk about Hyper-V-based high availability.
  • What’s Quick Migration?
  • What’s Live Migration?
  • Talk about downtime issues with Quick Migration vs. Live Migration.
  • Talk about the steps needed to be taken in order to setup a Live Migration setup.
  • What is CSV?
  • Can you create a Live Migration setup without CSV? Explain.
  • Mention a few methods for initiating a Live Migration movement of VMs between one host and another.
  • How do you monitor the performance of your VMs?
  • How do you know how much memory a specific VM uses?
  • How do you know what’s the I/O used on a Hyper-V host?
  • How do you monitor the bandwidth used by a specific VM?
  • Talk about SCVMM, SCOM, SCCM and Hyper-V.
  • Talk about WMI and Hyper-V.

Related Articles