2V0-13.25 VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architect Questions and Answers

To enforce strict separation of monitoring data, logs, and access control, deploying two separate VCF Operations instances is the recommended solution. This ensures that each department (HR and Finance) has a completely isolated monitoring stack, including dashboards, alerts, log retention, and user roles.

Although scopes and index partitions can provide some level of logical segregation within a single instance, they do not guarantee complete security isolation, especially in environments with strict compliance or multi-tenancy concerns. Deploying two separate instances ensures compliance with data isolation and privacy requirements, making it the most secure and compliant option.

This statement expresses a financial limit — “Remaining budget” — constraining future expenditures on hardware. This is clearly a constraint, as it restricts the design options (e.g., can't procure new hardware). In the VMware Conceptual Model framework, constraints are factors that limit design choices without introducing risk or goal definitions.

In a VCF Fleet with Disaster Recovery (AZ model):

vCenter is replicated to ensure management of vSphere workloads continues after a site failure.

NSX is replicated for networking continuity (segments, TEPs, Edge services).

Other components:

SDDC Manager is fleet-level and not replicated per AZ.

VCF Automation and VCF Operations are optional add-ons and not replicated automatically by the DR model.

Thus, vCenter and NSX are replicated across AZs for resiliency.

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, vSphere Pods (which support VMware Kubernetes Service or VKS clusters) use three types of storage: ephemeral VMDKs, persistent volume VMDKs, and container image VMDKs.

The document explicitly states:

> “A vSphere Pod requires ephemeral storage to store such Kubernetes objects as logs, emptyDir volumes, and ConfigMaps during its operations. This ephemeral, or transient, storage lasts as long as the pod continues to exist.”

Ephemeral storage is non-persistent by design and is deleted once the pod lifecycle ends. It provides temporary space for data that doesn’t need to persist beyond the pod’s lifespan, such as application logs, temporary caches, or transient compute data. This aligns with Kubernetes’ ephemeral storage model integrated into vSphere infrastructure.

Persistent workloads, by contrast, utilize storage policies and vSphere CNS-backed persistent volumes. Therefore, ephemeral storage is the correct type for non-persistent pod data.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Storage Policies for a Supervisor” (p. 5632–5633)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “vSphere Pod Storage Types: Ephemeral, Persistent, and Container Image VMDKs.”

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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.

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.”

Logical design decisions define how conceptual requirements are realized by technology features and configurations.

A is a logical design choice because it specifies how replication will be configured (synchronous) to meet an RPO requirement.

B is a requirement, not a design decision.

C is a physical design choice, as it specifies subnetting (/16 networks).

D is an application-level requirement, not a VCF infrastructure logical decision.

Thus, the logical design decision is using synchronous replication to satisfy RPO.

A Provider-managed Content Library is curated and controlled centrally by the VCF administrator or provider. It enables vetting and version control over VM templates and OVFs, ensuring compliance with organizational policies, including security reviews. This directly supports the requirement that all images must be reviewed and approved before being used in deployments.

The NSX VPC Full Services Model allows tenant isolation using VRF-lite, enabling independent routing tables within the same Tier-0 gateway.

This ensures dedicated external access without requiring a separate NSX Edge cluster per tenant, thereby minimizing the number of Edge clusters.

VMware VCF 9.0 recommends VRF Lite for multi-tenant environments with centralized Edge clusters and segmented routing needs.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design Guide specifies that in a Highly Available (HA) VCF Automation deployment, three appliances are deployed to ensure redundancy and meet a minimum availability SLA of 99.9%. To maintain continuous performance during host maintenance or hardware failure, VMware recommends:

“Each appliance instance should be placed on a separate ESXi host using a VM-host anti-affinity rule to eliminate single points of failure.”

Furthermore, to achieve external traffic distribution and redundancy, the guide states:

“In HA mode, an external load balancer is required to distribute requests across the cluster nodes and provide failover when a node or host becomes unavailable.”

The native Kubernetes load balancer cannot manage cross-node traffic distribution in an HA VCF Automation setup. Therefore, the architect must configure an external load balancer and define anti-affinity rules to ensure appliance distribution across hosts, achieving both the SLA and fault tolerance requirements.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Architecture and Design Guide — VCF Automation High Availability Deployment Model (pp. 455–460).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — Anti-Affinity Rules for Automation Nodes in HA Clusters.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Operations Guide — External Load Balancer Configuration Requirements for VCF Automation.

The correct mitigation for a skills-based risk is to bridge the gap through training and upskilling. Providing time and budget for training ensures that existing staff can competently support the solution and aligns with long-term sustainability of the environment.

Option A does not address the skills gap, just adds capacity. Option C is a risk identification tool, not a mitigation step. Option D outsources the issue, which contradicts the goal of internal capability development.

VCF Operations offers different deployment models based on scale and availability requirements:

Simple Model → Recommended for minimal footprint and greenfield deployments, where the organization wants to start small and expand later.

High Availability Model → Larger environments requiring immediate redundancy and scale.

Advanced / Standard Models → Targeted for more complex architectures with multi-site or advanced collection needs.

Since the customer’s goal is minimal footprint with future scalability, the Simple Model is the correct choice.

The Conceptual Model identifies high-level requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks. The Logical Design translates those into how solution components (clusters, networks, storage, security zones, etc.) are structured to meet dependencies and requirements.

Physical Design comes after Logical Design and defines specific hardware, IP addresses, VLANs, etc.

High Availability Design is a subset of the logical/physical design focusing only on resiliency.

Configuration Guide is implementation-level documentation, not design.

Thus, the Logical Design defines how the infrastructure’s capabilities are arranged to satisfy conceptual dependencies.

VMware Cloud Foundation architecture uses the RACR framework (Requirements, Assumptions, Constraints, Risks) to classify inputs:

Business requirements describe high-level outcomes the business wants to achieve, often focusing on cost, efficiency, or customer satisfaction.

Technical requirements define how infrastructure should behave to meet performance, resiliency, or security needs.

Among the given options:

A (growth by 30%) and C (no SPOF) are technical requirements.

B (security and resiliency) is also a technical requirement.

D (reduce operational costs) directly aligns with business goals, making it the correct business requirement.

RAID-1 policies offer low latency and high performance, ideal for critical workloads such as transactional databases.

RAID-5/6 provides efficient capacity usage, which is preferred for non-critical workloads.

VMware recommends the vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) with 6 nodes minimum for performance and redundancy.The ESA supports better performance with fewer overheads than OSA. VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 promotes using vSAN ESA for mission-critical workloads when latency is a priority.

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, under the section “VKS Cluster Networking”, VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) supports two Container Network Interface (CNI) options — Antrea and Calico — for pod and service networking. The documentation explicitly states:

“A VKS cluster provisioned by the VKS supports two CNI options: Antrea (default) and Calico.”

It further explains that Antrea is automatically selected as the default and requires no explicit configuration unless the user specifies Calico in the cluster YAML file.

Antrea, developed by VMware, leverages Open vSwitch (OVS) for networking and supports advanced features such as network policy enforcement, encapsulation, and traffic visibility, making it the optimal default CNI for VKS clusters. Calico, using Linux bridge and BGP, remains an alternative for organizations requiring specific network topologies or integrations.

Thus, unless otherwise defined, all new VKS workload clusters in VMware Cloud Foundation are deployed using Antrea as the default network provider to maintain consistency, integration with NSX networking, and full compatibility with VCF lifecycle management.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Design Guide – “VKS Cluster Networking: Antrea (default) and Calico options.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 – “Set the Default CNI for VKS Clusters” (System-defined default: Antrea).

The VCF Identity Broker (VIDB) enables integration with enterprise identity systems and supports MFA. To reduce operational overhead:

Deploy VIDB once in the first VCF instance at DC01.

Point all additional VCF instances in the same private cloud to this VIDB.

This avoids deploying and managing multiple VIDB instances, reducing lifecycle overhead while still enabling 2FA.

Options A/B introduce unnecessary duplication. Option C centralizes in DC02, but requirement specifies DC01 is primary.

To ensure zero RPO and high availability for the management domain, the best-fit design is to use a vSAN Stretched Cluster. With a 2ms latency and shared witness site, this design enables synchronous replication and automatic failover, ensuring no data loss (RPO 0) and minimal downtime.

For the workload domains where 24-hour RTO is acceptable, Live Recovery (leveraging replication and automation like Site Recovery Manager or Aria Automation Orchestrator) can be used to minimize operational effort and still meet recovery timelines. This strategy also aligns with minimizing hardware overhead by using the standby test infrastructure as failover capacity.

The constraint forces the use of the existing array. However, there’s a risk that performance/capacity may be insufficient. VMware’s best practice for risk mitigation in RACR is to plan for contingency.

A is correct because securing budget allocation for additional hardware addresses the risk if the array cannot meet requirements.

B (RAID mirroring) improves redundancy, not performance or capacity.

C contradicts the constraint (cannot ignore existing array).

D (extra Fibre Channel switches) doesn’t address storage array performance/capacity.

Thus, the best mitigation is budget planning for new hardware if the array fails to meet requirements.

VMware Cloud Foundation scales using workload domains (WLDs). Each WLD provides its own vCenter Server, NSX Manager, and lifecycle independence through SDDC Manager.

By using multiple WLDs for each department, the architecture supports independent scaling, policy separation, and lifecycle management.

Option A or C restricts flexibility as all tenants would share a single WLD, leading to lifecycle constraints and “noisy neighbor” issues.

Option D contradicts best practices: multiple departments should not share a single cluster inside a WLD when separation and lifecycle flexibility are required.

This design ensures seamless addition of new workload domains as departments and applications grow.

Validating a BCDR strategy in VCF with vSAN DP requires both impact analysis and active testing:

B. Assess the impact of failover scenarios – Ensures application dependencies, such as inter-site routing, DNS, and external services, are validated against failover scenarios. This prevents unexpected downtime due to overlooked dependencies.

D. Planned and unplanned failover tests – VMware best practices emphasize testing both scheduled and unexpected recovery workflows to validate RTOs and confirm operational procedures.

Why not the others?

A (annual testing only) contradicts VMware guidance, which recommends frequent and scenario-based validation.

C (generic plans) reduces workload alignment; VMware requires application-aware recovery plans.

E (vSphere HA/DRS) does not replace site-level recovery orchestration and validation — HA/DRS only handles local host failures, not site disasters.

Deploying two VCF Instances allows isolation between environments. One instance can serve as development/test and the other as production.

This separation enables patch/upgrade validation without impacting production. VCF architecture supports managing multiple VCF instances in a Fleet for centralized visibility and policy enforcement.

VMware explicitly recommends separating environments for lifecycle testing in environments with strict change control policies.

Business requirements describe the high-level goals of the organization, typically related to user experience, cost reduction, compliance, or agility.

A (best end-user experience) aligns directly with business objectives.

B, C, and D are technical requirements: they specify infrastructure design behaviors (migration, security, SLA).

Therefore, the business requirement is ensuring the best end-user experience.

The requirement to maintain software at N-1 versioning ensures that all components in the system maintain the most recent stable version of software while avoiding risks associated with "bleeding-edge" updates. This is a Security design quality because N-1 compliance mitigates exposure to vulnerabilities that might be present in older, unsupported versions. Additionally, VMware Cloud Foundation emphasizes maintaining the full stack within a supported compatibility matrix, aligning with security and compliance frameworks.

The High Availability (HA) deployment model of VCF Operations ensures that both monitoring and alerting services are resilient to node failure. Deploying Collector nodes at remote sites enables local data collection, reducing WAN dependency and ensuring data is not lost during network interruptions.

This configuration aligns perfectly with the need to minimize monitoring and alerting downtime, which is critical in distributed, multi-instance environments.

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, the vSphere Supervisor leverages the Cluster API open-source project to provide declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs for the creation, configuration, and lifecycle management of VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) clusters.

The documentation states:

“The Cluster API provides declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs for cluster creation, configuration, and management. The inputs to Cluster API include a resource describing the cluster, a set of resources describing the virtual machines that make up the cluster, and a set of resources describing cluster add-ons.”

This API-driven model allows for automated provisioning and scaling of Kubernetes clusters by defining the desired state through YAML manifests. Cluster API (CAPI) is a CNCF open-source project that VMware has extended and integrated into vSphere Supervisor to deliver infrastructure-level automation, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and lifecycle management for VKS clusters.

In contrast, Grafana is used for monitoring, Contour for ingress control, and Kubeadm is a bootstrapping tool for standalone Kubernetes clusters — none of which provide cluster lifecycle automation in VKS.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide — “VKS Architecture and Components.” (pp. 5635–5637)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Supervisor Components — “Cluster API Integration for VKS Lifecycle Management.”