Free Practice Questions for VMware 2V0-13.25 Exam

The VCF 9.0.1 Design Guide provides sizing best practices for vSAN stretched clusters, emphasizing capacity planning to accommodate failover conditions. It states:

“When sizing a stretched vSAN cluster, consider that in case of a site failure, all resources from the failed site must be supported by the surviving site. Therefore, compute and storage should not exceed 50% utilization per site.”

This translates into a maximum target utilization of ~45% compute and ~40% storage per site, ensuring compliance with the company’s overall 90% capacity policy when combined across both sites.

A homogeneous cluster configuration (A) ensures consistent performance and predictable recovery during failover.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — “vSAN Stretched Cluster Capacity Planning and Sizing.” (pp. 874–885)

VMware vSAN Design and Sizing Reference — “Cluster Utilization Planning for Failover Scenarios.”

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (Based on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide):

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide clearly states that a single-site deployment introduces inherent risks when availability requirements extend beyond single host or rack failures. It specifies:

“A single-site VCF deployment tolerates host, rack, and component failure, but does not provide protection against total site failure. This design profile is not well-suited for disaster recovery or high availability across sites.”

Since the architect assumed that the solution must support high availability for workloads, but the environment is hosted entirely on a single physical site, the solution would not meet this assumption in the event of a site outage. This discrepancy represents a design risk — a potential event or condition that could prevent the design from fulfilling the availability requirement.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — VCF Fleet in a Single Site Blueprint and Risk Considerations for HA and DR.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Architecture Overview — Availability and Recoverability Design Qualities.

Upgrading a vSphere + vSAN environment to a full VMware Cloud Foundation deployment requires introducing the components that make up the integrated software-defined data center (SDDC):

A. NSX – Provides network virtualization, overlay segments, distributed firewalling, and routing required in VCF.

B. SDDC Manager – The core management and lifecycle automation tool of VCF, responsible for bring-up, patching, and upgrades.

E. vSphere Supervisor – Required to enable VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and modern application deployment in VCF environments.

Why not the others?

C. VCF Identity Broker – Provides federated authentication but is not mandatory for initial upgrade. It is optional depending on identity requirements.

D. VCF Operations – This is VMware Aria Operations (for monitoring/analytics). While strongly recommended, it is not required to upgrade from vSphere/vSAN to VCF.

When gathering business requirements, VMware’s VCF Design and Planning methodology (referenced in the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture and Design Guide) specifies that architects must first analyze the business-level inputs that define availability, manageability, and compliance objectives. The documentation identifies Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and Organizational Structure as key influencing factors on design decisions because they define the scope of reliability, operational responsibility, and risk tolerance of the solution.

SLAs determine the required uptime, RPO/RTO targets, and recovery policies, directly impacting design elements such as stretched clusters, backup configuration, and resource redundancy. Similarly, the organizational structure affects operational models and determines how administrative domains, roles, and tenancy will be separated — influencing whether to implement single-tenancy or multi-tenancy within VCF Automation and how management domains are segregated.

Other options such as product versions, VM sizes, or storage capacity are important for implementation and scaling phases, not the business requirements stage. VMware explicitly distinguishes between business requirements (goals, SLAs, governance) and technical requirements (capacity, configuration) in the VCF Design Library.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Design Guide — Business Requirements Gathering Framework (VCF-DES-PLN-BREQ-001).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Overview — SLAs and Organizational Models Impact on Design Decisions.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Library — Mapping Business Requirements to Design Factors.

Due to the explicit constraint that no internet access is permitted, the VCF Installer cannot connect to an online depot. Instead, the architect must use the offline depot model, where binaries are downloaded externally and made accessible locally within the VCF environment (e.g., using a local web server).

This setup aligns with VMware's "air-gapped" deployment guidance for VCF environments with strict security postures.

Dedicated NSX instances per workload domain provide the highest level of logical isolation and allow independent upgrade cycles, fulfilling the requirement of tenant-specific customization. Each workload domain with its own NSX instance can be managed separately, updated independently, and configured with its own security policies, BGP/VRF, segments, and gateways.

NSX Federation could achieve some level of centralization but does not support independent upgrade cycles per domain. A shared NSX instance breaks isolation and would tightly couple upgrade cycles, violating two of the key stated requirements.

Availability relates to ensuring services are continuously accessible, even in case of component failure.

Making management components (e.g., vCenter, NSX Manager, SDDC Manager) redundant guarantees higher availability.

Other qualities:

Performance = speed of execution.

Manageability = ease of administration.

Recoverability = ability to restore after failure (not redundancy itself).

Thus, the redundancy requirement directly maps to Availability.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide defines Manageability as the design quality that focuses on monitoring, configuration, reporting, and operational management capabilities. It states:

“Manageability encompasses the ability to monitor, configure, and control the solution effectively, ensuring operational insights and compliance with business objectives.”

The requirement to support 10,000 monitored objects and retain monitoring data for 24 months directly relates to the system’s ability to manage and retain operational metrics, not to its performance or availability. These parameters ensure long-term visibility, compliance, and data analytics consistency—core elements of Manageability.

In contrast:

Performance focuses on throughput and latency.

Availability ensures uptime and fault tolerance.

Recoverability deals with restoration after failure.

Therefore, the classification of these requirements falls under Manageability, as they directly define how the system manages and retains monitoring data.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture Guide — “Design Qualities: Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability, and Security.” (pp. 72–74)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design Framework — “Classification of Monitoring and Retention Requirements under Manageability.”

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture Guide defines three levels of design abstraction — Conceptual, Logical, and Physical. The Physical Design translates logical components into tangible configuration and implementation details. VMware describes it as:

“The physical design includes the specific details for hardware models, network topologies, storage layouts, port configurations, VLAN IDs, and zoning of Fibre Channel fabrics.”

In contrast:

The Conceptual Design defines what the solution must deliver (high-level goals and relationships).

The Logical Design outlines component relationships and service flows without vendor-specific or configuration details.

Therefore, the Physical Design is where the architect defines server model types, port mappings, uplink configurations, vSAN disk group layouts, and Fibre Channel zones, all aligned to the validated VCF Bill of Materials (BOM).

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Design Definitions (pp. 79–81).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Architecture Overview — Physical Design Implementation Detailing Hardware and Network Configuration.