CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

What is the most efficient way to set up a large collection of virtual machines in the same configuration?

1. Storage mirroring

2. Cloning

3. Redundancy

4. Snapshots

The correct answer is: Cloning

Cloning is the most efficient method for setting up a large collection of virtual machines with the same configuration. When cloning, you create a copy of an existing virtual machine, which includes all of its settings, applications, and data. This allows for rapid deployment of multiple identical VMs, saving time and ensuring consistency across the environment. Cloning is especially beneficial in scenarios where you need to scale out applications or services across multiple virtual machines that share the same baseline configuration. It eliminates the need to set up each virtual machine from scratch, thereby significantly reducing manual setup time and minimizing the potential for errors that could occur during individual configurations. In contrast, other options like storage mirroring primarily focus on data redundancy and protection rather than efficient VM deployment, redundancy deals with ensuring availability and reliability of systems, and snapshots capture the state of a VM at a point in time but do not provide a means to deploy multiple VMs efficiently. Each of these methods has its specific use cases, but for the goal of quickly and uniformly setting up a large number of virtual machines, cloning stands out as the most effective method.