3V0-21.23 VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced Design Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Creating a separate vSphere cluster for management workloads ensures that these workloads, which are critical for monitoring, managing, and orchestrating the environment, do not compete for resources with compute workloads. This separation enhances the stability and reliability of management functions, even during periods of high resource utilization by compute workloads.

The database must be backed up every day during the maintenance window of 1:00AM and 3:00AM.

This is a logical design requirement because it specifies the timing for the backup operations. It's important to define backup schedules to align with the maintenance window, ensuring minimal disruption to production workloads.

The database will be backed up using an API-based backup solution.

This is a logical design decision that specifies the method of backup. Using an API-based backup solution is a modern, efficient way to ensure consistent and application-aware backups of databases.

The solution will deploy VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus on all hosts within the cluster.

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus offers advanced networking and storage features that will support the required high availability, performance, and management capabilities. Features such as Distributed Switches and Network I/O Control (NIOC) are critical to meeting the business-critical application and performance requirements for the latency-sensitive stock trading application.

The solution will deploy a single vSphere Distributed Switch with each host connected to it.

A vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is ideal for managing network configurations centrally across multiple hosts, which meets the requirement for centralized vSphere operational management. It also ensures consistent network configurations and simplifies network management at scale.

The solution will configure Network I/O control to ensure that system-level bandwidth does not impact workload network traffic.

Network I/O Control (NIOC) is essential for prioritizing network traffic, ensuring that latency-sensitive workloads are not impacted by other system-level or less critical traffic. This is crucial for the performance requirements of the stock trading application.

When the shell sandbox is enabled on ESXi hosts, it restricts the execution of commands within the shell to ensure that only authorized or safe commands are allowed. This provides a level of isolation that limits the potential for accidental or malicious commands to be run in the shell, enhancing security while still providing necessary administrative access.

The customer's requirement for making it easy to identify and apply patches or updates to ESXi hosts, including pre-staging the files, is focused on simplifying the management of the vSphere environment. This is a key aspect of manageability, which refers to the ease with which IT administrators can handle tasks like patching, updates, and configuration management in a consistent and efficient manner.

Use an active-active array for Fibre Channel storage-based VMFS datastores

An active-active array provides redundancy and load balancing by allowing multiple paths to be active at the same time, ensuring better performance and fault tolerance. This supports the requirement for redundancy and no single point of failure by ensuring that storage traffic can be distributed across multiple paths to different storage controllers.

Configure a minimum of two paths to every LUN or datastore

Having multiple paths to every LUN or datastore is essential for ensuring redundancy in the storage path. In case one path fails, the system can continue to function by using the other path, meeting the requirement for tolerance to at least one failure.

Configure a minimum of four paths to every LUN or datastore

Configuring four paths further increases redundancy, ensuring that the storage system can tolerate multiple path failures while still maintaining access to the LUN or datastore. This improves load balancing and provides greater fault tolerance.

VLAN-backed NSX segments meet the requirement of ensuring that logical networks do not span physical network boundaries because VLANs are inherently limited to a single physical network segment. Each VLAN maps to a specific Layer 2 broadcast domain and can be isolated to particular physical network segments, ensuring that no logical network spans across physical boundaries. Additionally, static routing is supported with VLAN-backed segments, providing the flexibility needed to configure routing between different subnets or networks.

To enable high availability of virtual machines across different availability zones.

vSAN stretched clusters provide high availability by replicating virtual machine data across two geographically separated sites (or availability zones). This ensures that in the event of a failure at one site, the virtual machines can continue running from the other site, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. The solution is particularly useful for disaster recovery and fault tolerance across multiple sites, meeting the requirement for high availability across different availability zones.

Network I/O Control (NIOC) is a key feature available with distributed virtual switches (vDS) that allows administrators to prioritize and allocate bandwidth to specific network traffic types. It ensures that business-critical applications receive the necessary bandwidth and maintain a consistent quality of service (QoS). This solution meets the requirement to ensure optimal network bandwidth allocation and service consistency.

The customer's requirements include the following:

Carry over existing VLANs for workloads: This can be easily achieved with a vSphere distributed switch (VDS), as it supports the configuration of VLANs and ensures that they can be applied to multiple ESXi hosts across the data center.

Networking for storage must not share the data path with workload traffic: By using aggregated uplinks in the VDS configuration, the architect can easily separate workload traffic and storage traffic by using different uplinks or VLANs. Aggregated uplinks ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth for both workloads and storage, while keeping them logically separated in terms of traffic management.

Add additional VLANs: A VDS supports the dynamic addition of VLANs. New VLANs can be added and managed centrally, reducing the complexity and management overhead when scaling the network.

Reduce management overhead: The use of a single VDS significantly reduces management complexity compared to managing multiple vSphere standard switches (VSS). With VDS, network configuration and management are centralized and simplified across all ESXi hosts.

Given that the new replacement servers have two 100 GB network cards, the aggregated uplinks in a VDS configuration will provide the required network capacity while ensuring that traffic is properly segmented and scalable.

Based on VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced documentation and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) resources, the architect needs to identify the benefit of using workload domains in a VCF environment. Workload domains are a core construct in VCF, designed to simplify the deployment and management of Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) components, including vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vCenter.

Analysis of Workload Domains in VCF:

Workload Domains: In VCF, workload domains are logical units that group compute, storage, and networking resources to host specific workloads (e.g., production, development, or DMZ). They include a vSphere cluster, vSAN storage, NSX networking, and a dedicated vCenter instance, managed through the SDDC Manager.

Purpose: Workload domains provide isolation, scalability, and simplified management by automating the deployment and configuration of SDDC components according to VMware’s best practices.

Evaluation of Options:

A. Workload domains require separate instances of vCenter, decreasing complexity and management overhead:

Why incorrect: While workload domains do include a dedicated vCenter instance for each domain to ensure isolation and independent management, this increases management overhead rather than decreasing it. Each vCenter instance requires separate administration, monitoring, and patching, which adds complexity compared to a single vCenter managing multiple clusters. This is not a benefit.

VMware Cloud Foundation documentation notes that separate vCenter instances per workload domain enhance isolation but increase management tasks.

B. Workload domains allow for manual provisioning of vSphere clusters using the SDDC Manager:

Why incorrect: Workload domains are provisioned automatically through the SDDC Manager, not manually. The SDDC Manager automates the creation, configuration, and deployment of workload domains based on predefined templates and policies, reducing manual effort. Manual provisioning contradicts VCF’s automation-centric approach.

To meet the customer requirements, we need to address the two specific scenarios:

Workloads must be automatically relocated to other hosts in the event that a host hardware is marked as degraded:

This requirement can be fulfilled by Proactive HA. Proactive HA is a feature of vSphere HA that works in conjunction with hardware health monitoring tools, such as the vendor’s plugin for vCenter. When the vendor's monitoring tool marks a host as degraded (due to hardware issues), Proactive HA can automatically trigger the migration of workloads to other hosts, based on the Automation Level configuration.

Workloads must be automatically restarted on other hosts in the event of a host failure:

This can be managed using vSphere HA with the setting to restart VMs when a host fails. This ensures that in the event of a host failure, workloads are automatically restarted on available hosts in the cluster.

By enabling Proactive HA with an Automation Level of Automated, the architect ensures that degraded hosts are automatically handled (through workload migration) without manual intervention.

To meet the requirement of a maximum tolerable downtime (MTD) of one hour per month for production applications, the solution must ensure high availability and quick recovery of virtual machines (VMs) in the event of a host failure. Enabling vSphere High Availability (HA) with the Host Failure Response set to Restart VMs will automatically restart VMs on other hosts within the cluster inthe event of a host failure. This minimizes downtime and helps meet the MTD requirement by ensuring minimal disruption to production workloads.

For NIC Teaming, all NICs in the same port group must be in the same layer 2 broadcast domain.

This is a key consideration for NIC teaming. All NICs in a team must be in the same Layer 2 broadcast domain to ensure that traffic is properly routed and that the NIC team can work as expected within the vSphere environment. This is necessary for network redundancy and communication consistency.

To increase availability, the NICs within a NIC team should be from different physical NIC Cards.

To eliminate single points of failure, NICs within the same NIC team should be sourced from different physical NIC cards. This way, if one physical NIC card fails, the other NICs in the team will still be able to handle network traffic, ensuring availability.

NIC Teaming requires a minimum of two physical network connections.

NIC Teaming relies on having at least two physical NICs for redundancy and load balancing. This is a basic requirement to prevent single points of failure in network connectivity. With only one NIC, there would be no fault tolerance.