EMC IT-as-a-Service Expert Exam for Cloud Architects Sample Questions:

1. Refer to Scenario 7.
-- Exhibit -
Scenario 7.
A web hosting company has been growing steadily over the past year. Their single data center is at maximum capacity for power, space and cooling, and their physical infrastructure is also running at capacity. They are evaluating the feasibility of obtaining another data center in a remote location to enable further growth.
One of the web hosting company's eCommerce customers notifies them that they are launching an enormous holiday sale, beginning in a few weeks. They expect utilization of their virtual server farm to double or triple for the next three to six months. The web hosting company cannot deploy the needed resources in a new data center in time for the sale. They opt to purchase services from a cloud service provider using a pay-as-you-go model.
Over the next two weeks, Layer 2 connectivity is established between the two sites. The web hosting company's IT staff works with the CSP to configure the necessary physical and virtual infrastructure. All traffic to the public cloud is routed through the private data center, across the Layer 2 connection. A local load balancer is deployed in the private data center. Orchestration tools are configured to burst the service into the public cloud automatically when utilization reaches 80%.
-- Exhibit -
To test the functionality of the new infrastructure, a load simulator is used to increase utilization on the servers. At 80% utilization, the orchestration tools provision the required resources in the public cloud. However, the utilization on the private cloud resources continues to increase, while the utilization on the public cloud resources remains at 0%.
What is the most likely cause of this problem?

A) The local load balancer is not being updated with the new service information
B) The wrong VLANs are configured across the network link
C) The global load balancer is not being updated with the new service information
D) The wrong subnets are configured across the network link

2. The CEO of a company states that the IT department has serious problems to solve:
-There have been several breaches of company confidential data over the years. -IT budgets are frequently over- or under-estimated -The IT organization might not meet regulatory compliance requirements for the several countries
in which they operate. -There is a lack of alignment of IT activities with the organization as a whole.
Which action should be taken by the board of directors and senior executives to most quickly and effectively resolve all of these issues and concerns?

A) Place company confidential data into security zones
B) Implement IT governance within the organization
C) Perform a third-party audit of IT operations
D) Form a services governance committee

3. A company with a very high virtualization percentage decided to move to a cloud architecture. They hired a cloud service provider (CSP) to provide infrastructure on demand. The company moved the web front-end of a tightly coupled service to the CSP. Now users are complaining about slow response and timeout errors when accessing some of the web based applications.
What is the most likely reason for this issue?

A) The company data center and the CSP do not have Layer 3 connectivity
B) Users are not in the same Layer 2 domain as the CSP
C) One or more web server dependencies were not moved together to the CSP
D) The company data center and the CSP do not have Layer 2 extension

4. An IT security team is concerned about the authentication traffic patterns that may be required to integrate the private and public clouds. As a result, IT has elected to federate their active directory using ADFS from the private cloud to the public cloud.
One of the design decisions is whether to use a Layer 2, 3, or 7 firewall / switch mechanism between the public and private clouds. There are trade-offs with each choice.
Which network layer would best address this situation, and why?

A) Layer 3, because it allows segment isolation while still providing high performance levels.
B) Layer 7, because it allows control at the application layer and is policy driven.
C) Layer 2, because it provides the best performance and it is easy to isolate problems.
D) Layer 2, because it provides the simplest configuration to manage and it is easy to isolate and troubleshoot problems.

5. Refer to Scenario 1 below.
An IT department is offering 50 Service Offerings in their service catalog to meet all the application developers' needs. Many of the variants have a very small number of associated instantiations. A "big data" platform is offered and being actively utilized by a team of data scientists.
All services are sourced from within the private cloud. The developers are able to customize the platform's compute, storage, protection and network configuration upon instantiation. They can also provision additional resources after the initial instantiation through an upgrade service within the catalog. Because of the culture of the organization, no chargeback mechanism is implemented.
Within six months, IT experiences these problems:
(a). Developers are complaining of poor and inconsistent performance
(b). Resource utilization has far exceeded expectations
(c). The environment has become very complex
(d). Since the resource pools are shared throughout the organization, IT has been unable to identify usage patterns, making capacity planning very difficult
What can the IT department do to address problem (a)?

A) Offer additional, larger resource platform options to the developers
B) Standardize on a subset of offerings to meet the needs of most developers and minimize the number of customization options
C) Divide the "application developer" and "big data" workloads into separate resource pools
D) Communicate appropriate SLAs that are realistic given the demand and resources available

Solutions: