HomeVmwareVMware Certified Advanced Professional - VCAP Administrator Storage3V0-23.25 Exam Dumps (V8.02) Help You Achieve Success 2026: Pass Your Advanced VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Storage Exam

January 30, 2026

3V0-23.25 Exam Dumps (V8.02) Help You Achieve Success 2026: Pass Your Advanced VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Storage Exam

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1. An L3 Support Engineer is configuring a VCF 9.0 vSAN Stretched Cluster. The cluster includes two sites (Preferred and Secondary).

The goal is to ensure Tier-1 database VMs strictly run on the Preferred Site during normal operations, but gracefully failover to the Secondary Site if the Preferred Site burns down.

The engineer uses Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) to check cluster state while configuring vSphere DRS.

[RVC Output: vsan.stretchedcluster_config]

Preferred Site: esx-01, esx-02, esx-03

Secondary Site: esx-04, esx-05, esx-06

Which TWO configurations MUST the engineer apply to the DRS Host/VM Groups to satisfy this DR requirement? (Choose 2.)

The engineer must disable DRS Automation (set to Manual) to prevent VMs from accidentally moving to the Secondary site during daytime high CPU loads.

The engineer must map the DRS VM groups directly to the vSAN Unicast Agent tables via CL

The engineer must apply a "SHOULD run on hosts in group" DRS rule; this keeps the VMs on the Preferred site normally, but allows vSphere HA to violate the rule and restart them on the Secondary site during a total site failure.

The engineer must apply a "MUST run on hosts in group" DRS rule for the VMs; "MUST" ensures that HA can strictly map the IPs during failover.

The engineer must create a DRS "Host Group" containing ONLY the Preferred Site hosts (esx-01 through esx-03).

2. A SOC Analyst is tracing the root cause of a temporary datastore brown-out that occurred during a major data ingestion event in a VCF Workload Domain.

[Log Analysis: vpxd.log]

2026-11-20T10:00:00Z WARN vpxd - [vSAN] DOM Client on host esx-05 queuing I/O for VM 'Ingest-01'. Limit: 10000 IOPS exceeded.

2026-11-20T10:02:15Z ERROR vpxd - [vSAN] Component congestion limit reached (255) on backend capacity devices esx-01 and esx-02.

2026-11-20T10:02:20Z FATAL vpxd - [vSAN] System-wide backpressure initiated. All VMs on esx-05 experiencing > 500ms latency.

The 'Ingest-01' VM was assigned an SPBM policy with IOPS Limit: 10000.

How did the interaction between the IOPS limit and the backend network/storage result in system-wide congestion, and what does this reveal about IOPS limits as a protection mechanism? (Select all that apply.)

IOPS limits automatically disable the log-structured filesystem's compression engine, forcing the cluster to ingest uncompressed data.

The system-wide backpressure occurs because DOM Client buffers filled up entirely when the backend drives jammed, forcing the hypervisor to pause the vCPU of all VMs on esx-05.

The 10,000 IOPS limit was set too high for a 128KB block-size workload; normalizing large blocks translates 10,000 I/O requests into 40,000 equivalent vSAN IOPS, overwhelming the backend capacity.

The IOPS limit successfully throttled the VM at the source (DOM Client), meaning the backend congestion on esx-01 and esx-02 was caused by *other* unthrottled VMs in the cluster, not 'Ingest-01'.

IOPS limits are applied at the component level, not the VM level, meaning 'Ingest-01' was allowed 10,000 IOPS for every single component stripe, defeating the QoS cap.

3. An Infrastructure Manager is auditing the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) behavior for virtual machines running on an HCI Mesh Compute-Only Client cluster.

[root@esx-comp-01:~] esxcli vsan debug object list -u 5543...

Object UUID: 5543... (VM: Database-01)

Policy: FTT=1 (RAID-1), IOPS Limit: 2000

Component 1: ACTIVE (Host: esx-storage-05) -> Remote Server Cluster

Component 2: ACTIVE (Host: esx-storage-06) -> Remote Server Cluster

Witness: ACTIVE (Host: esx-storage-07) -> Remote Server Cluster

How do SPBM rules mechanically enforce storage protection and QoS when the VM compute (esx-comp-01) and storage backend (esx-storage-05/06) exist in completely different physical clusters? (Select all that apply.)

The SPBM engine on the Client host must duplicate the data (2x multiplier) across the network to satisfy the RAID-1 requirement, doubling ISL bandwidth.

The "IOPS Limit" (QoS) rule is strictly enforced by the DOM Client module running on the *Client compute host* (esx-comp-01), throttling the DB I/O before it even hits the network.

If the network between the Client and Server cluster is severed, the VM on esx-comp-01 will continue running in read-only mode using local NVMe cache.

The "Failures to Tolerate" (RAID-1) layout logic is strictly managed by the DOM Owner module on the *Remote Server cluster*, ensuring the components never reside in the same fault domain.

4. A CTO is evaluating the performance inconsistencies of a mission-critical SQL database running on a legacy 3-tier Fibre Channel architecture. The database randomly suffers from high latency during end-of-month reporting, even though the database VM itself shows low CPU utilization.

[Architecture Diagram: Legacy 3-Tier SAN]

Datastore: SAN-LUN-01 (10

TB)

VM 1: SQL-Prod-01

(Critical)

VM 2: Backup-Proxy-01 (Heavy

I/O)

VM 3: Test-Dev-Server (Uncapped

I/O)

VM 4..20: General

Workloads

Based on the traditional storage architecture diagram, what is the inherent structural limitation causing the latency spikes for the SQL database?

Traditional SANs group multiple distinct virtual machines onto a single monolithic LUN, creating a shared storage queue where aggressive VMs starve critical VMs of IOPS (the "noisy neighbor" problem).

The SQL database lacks the "Multi-Writer" flag, preventing it from bypassing the hypervisor kernel queue limits.

The Fibre Channel fabric cannot process multipathing signals efficiently, causing SCSI reservations to lock the entire fabric.

The ESXi hosts are configured with software iSCSI adapters instead of hardware HBAs, increasing the interrupt handling overhead.

5. A VCF Architect is designing the next-generation storage strategy for a massive VCF 9.0 environment. The business wants to leverage "vSAN Max" (Disaggregated HCI) as the central storage hub.

[Proposed Architecture Diagram]

* WLD01-Storage: 16-Node vSAN Max Cluster (Petabytes of NVMe)

* WLD02-Compute: 32-Node vSphere Cluster (No storage, mounted to WLD01)

* WLD03-AI: 8-Node GPU Cluster (No storage, mounted to WLD01)

Which of the following statements correctly evaluate the architectural benefits and operational trade-offs of using vSAN Max (HCI Mesh) over Traditional Aggregated HCI? (Select all that apply.)

vSAN Max effectively recreates the "SAN storage centralization" model, consolidating the failure domain for storage to a single cluster, which requires robust network paths and switch redundancy.

Because the compute nodes process NO storage tasks, vSAN Max frees up the CPU cycles on WLD02 and WLD03 to be used 100% for the Virtual Machine applications.

vSAN Max clusters utilize dedicated hardware Data Processing Units (DPUs) that completely replace the ESXi hypervisor, converting the servers into pure storage appliances.

A limitation of Disaggregated HCI is that vSphere DRS cannot vMotion VMs between WLD02 and WLD03 because they are distinct vCenter clusters.

vSAN Max solves the "Licensing TCO" problem by allowing the customer to purchase expensive vSAN Enterprise licenses only for the 16 Storage nodes, leaving the 40 Compute nodes to use basic vSphere licenses.

6. Which statement accurately defines the architectural behavior of the "Site Disaster Tolerance" storage policy rule when set to "Dual site mirroring" in a vSAN Stretched Cluster?

It forces read operations to be serviced from the Secondary site while all write operations are committed exclusively to the Preferred site.

It configures vSphere Replication to asynchronously stream data to the secondary site every 5 minutes to protect against site failure.

It instructs the Distributed Object Manager (DOM) to write payload data synchronously to both the Preferred and Secondary fault domains, ensuring a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero.

It utilizes the vSAN Witness Appliance to store a third copy of the virtual machine data blocks, acting as an active-active backup target.

7. A VCF Deployment Specialist is adding three new ESXi hosts into SDDC Manager. The specialist wants the hosts to be eligible for a new vSAN ESA Workload Domain.

[SDDC Manager - Commission Hosts Wizard]

Host FQDN: esx-10.corp. local

Network Pool: VCF-NetPool-01

Storage Type: [ ? ]

When the specialist sets the Storage Type to vSAN ESA, what strict physical and logical validation does SDDC Manager enforce on the ESXi host before successfully completing the commissioning task?

It validates that the host has at least one SATA SSD mapped explicitly as a Cache drive and three SAS HDDs mapped as Capacity.

It validates that the host has previously joined the vCenter SSO domain and possesses the correct cryptographic tokens.

It validates that the host's RAID controller is set to RAID-5 mode, as vSAN ESA requires hardware-level erasure coding.

It validates that the host network configuration includes a minimum 25 GbE connection and that all storage devices are high-performance NVMe (all-NVMe).

8. An Infrastructure Manager is evaluating the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and operational trade-offs of expanding a traditional 3-tier SAN environment versus migrating to vSAN HCI for a 20-host VCF Workload Domain.

The database administrators argue for keeping the 3-tier SAN, citing "independent scaling." The VCF architects argue for HCI, citing "operational simplicity."

[TCO & Operations Profile]

Existing SAN: Dual Controller Array (Currently at 95% IOPS capacity, 40% disk capacity).

Proposed HCI: 20x vSAN ESA ReadyNodes.

Which of the following statements correctly evaluate the trade-offs and limitations of the 3-tier SAN architecture in this specific growth scenario? (Select all that apply.)

To fix the SAN IOPS bottleneck, the manager must purchase expensive new array controllers, incurring a massive upfront CapEx hit known as the "Forklift Upgrade."

The 3-tier SAN maintains a genuine architectural advantage by allowing the manager to add pure storage capacity (JBODs) without paying for additional ESXi CPU/RAM licenses.

HCI inherently consumes 30% of the physical network bandwidth just to maintain 3-tier legacy compatibility with Fibre Channel storage arrays.

The existing SAN exhibits the "stranded capacity" limitation; it has plenty of free disk space (60%), but cannot use it for high-IOPS workloads because the controllers are saturated.

Expanding HCI node-by-node allows granular OpEx spending (paying only for the CPU/Storage needed today), whereas SANs require predicting and purchasing 5-years of controller headroom upfront.

9. A Network Administrator is auditing the storage configuration for a VCF 9.0 environment. The environment contains a vSAN ESA cluster and a cluster of traditional ESXi hosts connected to legacy Fibre Channel LUNs.

The administrator discovers a critical anti-pattern while running an API query against the Storage DRS configurations using Ruby vSphere Console (RVC).

[RVC Output: vsan.cluster_info / WLD-All-Compute]

+-------------------------+-------------+--------------+------------------+

| Datastore Name | Type | SDRS Enabled | Automation Level |

+-------------------------+-------------+--------------+------------------+

| vsanDatastore-ESA-01 | vSAN ESA | True | Fully Automated |

| FC-LUN-01 | VMFS-6 | True | Fully Automated |

| FC-LUN-02 | VMFS-6 | True | Fully Automated |

+-------------------------+-------------+--------------+------------------+

Which TWO architectural statements describe the violations and necessary remediation for this specific Datastore Cluster configuration? (Choose 2.)

The vSAN datastore must be removed from the Datastore Cluster, as mixing vSAN and VMFS in the same SDRS cluster will cause severe metadata corruption.

Storage DRS can include the vSAN datastore only if the "I/O Metric Inclusion" threshold is disabled, as vSAN does not expose DAVG metrics.

Storage DRS is explicitly unsupported on vSAN Datastores; vSAN uses its own internal Distributed Object Manager (DOM) to balance capacity and I/

The "Fully Automated" setting on the FC LUNs violates the vSAN ESA requirement for strict physical switch traffic isolation.

10. A Compliance Auditor is validating that a proposed vSAN ReadyNode hardware cluster meets the exact requirements needed to support a highly aggressive Storage Policy requested by the development team.

The policy requires extreme read performance for a distributed file system.

# SPBM Policy: "Extreme-Read-Parallelism"

FailuresToTolerate: 1 (RAID-1)

StripeWidth: 10

ObjectSpaceReservation: 100%

The auditor examines the vSAN Sizer output. The Sizer rejects the existing 4-Node, 6-drive-per-host cluster configuration.

How does the interaction between the StripeWidth: 10 rule and the vSAN object placement algorithm dictate the required hardware ReadyNode scaling in the Sizer? (Select all that apply.)

Stripe Width is a logical construct that ignores physical drive count; the Sizer rejection is purely based on the FTT=1 memory overhead limit.

If the Sizer keeps the cluster at 4 nodes, it must recommend ReadyNodes equipped with a significantly higher density of NVMe drives per host (e.g., 12-24 drives per host) to satisfy the high local stripe width capacity.

The "Stripe Width = 10" rule forces the DOM to distribute a single replica of the VMDK across 10 distinct physical NVMe drives. If a single host only has 6 drives, the Sizer must expand the object across multiple hosts to find 10 drives.

The "ObjectSpaceReservation: 100%" component requires the Sizer to recommend drives with 100% dedicated cache capacity, which violates ESA standards.

The Sizer may recommend adding more hosts to the cluster (Scale-Out) to increase the aggregate number of physical NVMe spindles available to absorb the 10-wide stripe distribution.

11. A Cloud Administrator is integrating a third-party Backup solution with a vVols-backed VCF cluster. The goal is to perform crash-consistent backups with minimal stun time for the production VMs.

The storage team created an advanced array-side feature definition that is pushed to vCenter via the VASA Provider.

# SPBM Policy: "vVol-Backup-Optimized"

capabilities:

vvol:

array.snapshots: true

array.fast_clone:

true

ruleSet:

IOPS_Limit: 50000

How do vVols, VASA, and SPBM integrate to fulfill this backup requirement during the daily backup window? (Select all that apply.)

The array.fast_clone capability allows the backup software to export the vVol data directly over the management network without mounting it to an ESXi host.

When the backup software triggers a snapshot, vCenter uses VASA to instruct the physical array to create a hardware snapshot of the specific vVol, bypassing the ESXi storage stack entirely.

The integration practically eliminates the "VM stun" period that occurs during snapshot consolidation in traditional VMFS datastores.

Because vVols represent individual VMDKs on the array, the array can snapshot just the single VM's data, unlike VMFS where array snapshots must capture the entire 10 TB LUN containing dozens of VMs.

12. A Storage Administrator is troubleshooting erratic latency on a vSAN ESA cluster. Skyline Health indicates the system is healthy, but the Administrator suspects a Top-of-Rack switch buffer issue.

The Administrator executes the "vSAN Network Performance Test" (Proactive Test) across the cluster.

[Architecture Diagram: Network Perf Test]

Host 1 (Iperf Client) --> Switch --> Host 2 (Iperf Server)

Test Result: Target 25 Gbps. Achieved: 14 Gbps. Retransmits: 5,400.

How does this specific proactive test help the Administrator diagnose the HCI storage bottleneck? (Select all that apply.)

The test automatically adjusts the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) IOPS limits on the cluster to match the 14 Gbps actual bandwidth.

The test proves that the ESA DOM logic is incorrectly duplicating parity bits, causing network saturation.

The test runs entirely in the hypervisor memory network stack (using iperf), explicitly bypassing the physical NVMe drives; this proves the 11 Gbps loss is strictly a network fabric problem, not a slow hard drive problem.

The diagnostic output allows the Administrator to provide definitive proof to the Network team that the "25 GbE" ports are actually severely degraded under real-world TCP stress.

The high number of "Retransmits" (5,400) definitively confirms packet drops on the physical switch, strongly pointing to buffer overflows during the micro-bursts generated by the test.

13. A VCF Deployment Specialist is configuring the advanced data services (Deduplication, Compression, and Encryption) for a newly provisioned vSAN ESA cluster.

The specialist compares the configuration workflow against their past experience with vSAN OSA.

[vSAN Cluster Configuration - ESA]

Storage Pool: 4 x NVMe (per host)

Data-at-Rest Encryption: Enabled (KMS-Prod)

Deduplication: [DEPRECATED - N/A]

Compression: Enabled (via SPBM Policy)

Which of the following statements correctly contrast how vSAN ESA processes these data services compared to vSAN OSA? (Select all that apply.)

Both architectures utilize the storage controller's physical AES-NI hardware offloading to encrypt data, keeping hypervisor CPU usage below 5%.

vSAN ESA entirely deprecates the global Deduplication feature, replacing it with Adaptive RAID-5 and Log-Structured compression to achieve space efficiency without the hash table overhead.

In ESA, data is compressed *before* it is transmitted across the network to replica hosts, reducing ISL bandwidth consumption. In OSA, data is compressed only upon destaging to the capacity tier.

In OSA, compression is a cluster-wide setting applied at the disk group level. In ESA, compression is a per-VM policy set via SPBM, allowing administrators to disable compression for already-compressed video files.

In OSA, encryption occurs after deduplication/compression, requiring the system to decrypt the data every time garbage collection runs. In ESA, encryption happens at the top of the stack, saving massive CPU cycles.

14. A VCF Architect is designing the Supplemental Storage topology for a hybrid-cloud implementation. The design uses VMFS Datastore Clusters with Storage DRS (SDRS).

# SPBM Policy: "DB-Gold-Policy"

Tag: "Gold-Tier-FC"

Datastore Cluster: "DS-Cluster-Gold" (LUNs 1, 2, 3)

# VM Anti-Affinity Rule: "DB-App-Separation"

VMs: [DB-Node-01, DB-Node-02]

Rule Type: Intra-VM Anti-Affinity (Separate VMDKs)

To meet compliance, the Database VMDK and the Log VMDK for the same VM MUST reside on physically different LUNs.

How does the deep integration between SPBM tagging, SDRS, and VMFS LUN presentation execute this complex compliance requirement? (Select all that apply.)

Storage DRS executes a Deep Rekey on the Log VMDK to ensure cryptographic separation matches the physical separation of the LUNs.

If LUN 1 fills up, SDRS will move the DB-VMDK to LUN 3, but it will NOT move it to LUN 2, because doing so would violate the anti-affinity rule with the Log-VMDK already on LUN 2.

The "Gold-Tier-FC" tag ensures that SDRS only considers LUNs 1, 2, and 3 for placement, ignoring cheaper SATA LUNs that might have more free space.

The "Intra-VM Anti-Affinity" rule tells SDRS to actively separate the VMDKs. It will place the DB-VMDK on LUN 1 and the Log-VMDK on LUN 2 during initial provisioning.

SPBM automatically creates separate sub-folders on a single VMFS datastore to simulate LUN separation if the anti-affinity rule cannot be met physically.

15. Which statement accurately describes the operational behavior of the "VM Creation" proactive test in the VMware vSAN Skyline Health interface?

The test verifies storage health by creating, reading, and deleting a tiny virtual machine directory and file on the vSAN datastore from every host in the cluster.

The test creates a dummy virtual machine on each ESXi host, powers them on to verify management network connectivity, and then deletes them.

The test automatically migrates existing production VMs to a temporary NFS datastore to stress-test the vSAN storage rebuild process.

The test disables vSphere HA temporarily to safely benchmark the raw disk I/O capabilities of the vSAN datastore.

16. A Compliance Auditor is observing the physical decommissioning of a failed NVMe drive from a highly secure VCF financial cluster.

The vSAN cluster is configured with Data-at-Rest Encryption (D@RE) tied to an external KMS.

[Log Analysis: vpxd.log - Disk Removal Event]

2026-11-20T14:00:00Z INFO vpxd - [vSAN] Disk naa.500B... evacuated successfully.

2026-11-20T14:00:02Z INFO vpxd - [vSAN] Unmounting disk naa.500B...

2026-11-20T14:00:05Z INFO vpxd - [KMS] Key ID: 55a3... securely erased from host memory.

How does the interaction between the physical disk removal and the vSAN Encryption architecture satisfy strict data compliance wiping standards (e.g., NIST Crypto-Erase)? (Select all that apply.)

When the disk is unmounted from the vSAN pool, the ESXi hypervisor immediately deletes the unique Disk Encryption Key (DEK) associated with that specific drive from its secure volatile memory.

The ESXi host must execute a standard 3-pass overwrite algorithm directly on the drive using vSAN LSOM commands before releasing the drive latch.

Without the DEK, the residual data physically remaining on the NVMe flash cells is mathematically unrecoverable, completing a near-instantaneous "Crypto-Erase".

The external KMS server issues a command to detonate the physical TPM chip on the NVMe drive to prevent data recovery.

The administrator must connect the drive to a standalone Linux server to execute a dd command (zero-wipe) before it can be handed to the hardware recycler.

17. An Infrastructure Manager is sizing the "Operations Reserve" for a VCF 9.0 Workload Domain. The developers plan to use vSAN Data Protection with highly aggressive snapshot schedules for their CI/CD pipelines (e.g., snapshots every 15 minutes, retaining 48 hours).

[SDDC Manager - Capacity Configuration]

Default vSAN

Thresholds

Host Rebuild Reserve: 15%

(Enabled)

Operations Reserve: 5%

(Customized)

Historically, the manager lowered the Operations Reserve to 5% to grant more capacity to VMs.

How does the interaction of heavy snapshot activity and this customized Operations Reserve directly impact the cluster's stability and performance? (Select all that apply.)

Deep snapshot chains generate significant metadata overhead; when background snapshot deletions occur, they consume temporary staging space which can quickly exhaust a 5% Operations Reserve.

vSAN ESA snapshots do not consume Operations Reserve space because they are log-structured B-tree pointers, making the 5% setting perfectly safe.

The system will fail to delete older snapshots when the retention limit is reached if the Operations Reserve is full, causing the datastore to rapidly fill to 100%.

If the Operations Reserve is exhausted by snapshot consolidation overhead, vSAN will throttle incoming VM write I/O to zero to prevent datastore corruption.

18. A Compliance Auditor is reviewing the encryption and data-efficiency settings of a large VCF 9.0 environment. The environment contains a legacy VI Workload Domain running vSAN OSA, configured with strict data security and capacity optimization.

[Storage Policy View]

vSAN Cluster: Legacy-OSA-01

Data-at-Rest Encryption: Enabled (KMS Validated)

Deduplication and Compression: Enabled (All-Flash)

End users are complaining that application response times are sluggish during daily data ingestion windows, and vCenter alarms show ESXi CPU utilization at >95%.

How do the advanced data services in the OSA architecture contribute directly to this CPU saturation and resulting DOM congestion? (Select all that apply.)

In OSA, data must be compressed, deduped, and encrypted synchronously in the data path. Ingesting new data requires the CPU to execute SHA-1 hashing against the massive in-memory hash tables to find duplicates, consuming extreme amounts of CPU cycles.

The integration of Deduplication and Encryption is natively incompatible in OSA; the hypervisor must decrypt the data first, dedup it, and then re-encrypt it, causing a double-tax on the CP

Disabling Deduplication and Compression on this specific cluster would immediately relieve the CPU bottleneck, allowing the data to stream to the NVMe drives as raw blocks.

Deduplication hash tables are offloaded to the physical Top-of-Rack switches in VCF, meaning the ESXi CPU is a false indicator of the storage bottleneck.

If the CPU is pegged at 100% processing the Dedup hashes, the storage subsystem slows down, triggering DOM client congestion and causing the VM latency the end users are experiencing.

19. A VCF Architect is using SDDC Manager to create a VI Workload Domain that will immediately be configured as a vSAN Stretched Cluster.

To achieve this, the architect must coordinate the baseline Workload Domain creation with the specific Stretched Cluster network prerequisites. The architect reviews the prepared configuration:

[Network Configuration - WLD-03]

vSAN Network Segment (Site A): 192.168.10.0/24 (MTU 9000)

vSAN Network Segment (Site B): 192.168.20.0/24 (MTU 9000)

Witness Network Segment: 192.168.100.0/24 (MTU 1500)

Static Routes: Site A/B vSAN networks <-> Witness network

License: vSAN Enterprise Applied

Which of the following actions and configurations are REQUIRED to successfully integrate the SDDC Manager workflow with the Stretched Cluster deployment? (Select all that apply.)

The Witness Appliance must be imported and registered into SDDC Manager inventory prior to running the Workload Domain creation wizard.

The vSAN License assigned during the Workload Domain creation must be 'vSAN Enterprise' or higher to support the Stretched Cluster topology.

The VI Workload Domain must first be deployed as a standard single-site cluster in SDDC Manager before it can be converted into a Stretched Cluster via day-2 operations.

The vSAN Network Segment (Site B) must be placed on a separate Layer 2 VLAN from Site A, meaning static routes must be configured on the hosts for cross-site vSAN communication.

20. A CTO is investigating a catastrophic outage. A TKG Worker Node containing several critical database First Class Disks (FCDs) suffered data corruption.

The node was running on a host experiencing high load, and standard VMDK backup routines (via VADP) were disabled to save CPU cycles. The storage team attempted to restore the FCDs using low-level API commands.

The engineer uses vim-cmd to inspect the FCD state:

[root@esx-08:~] vim-cmd vmsvc/get.tasklist

Task: ReconcileFCD_Task

Status: Failed

Error: "VStorageObjectNotFound"

[root@esx-08:~] vim-cmd vmsvc/device.diskaddexisting 20 /vmfs/volumes/vsan/fcd/88b1...

Error: "The disk object requires a CryptoKeyID which was not found in the current KMS provider."

How do the concepts of FCD independence and vSAN Encryption interact to create this restoration failure? (Select all that apply.)

First Class Disks (FCDs) retain their SPBM-assigned capabilities (including Encryption Key IDs) independent of the worker node V

CNS volumes inherently use "Self-Encrypting Drives" (SEDs) where the FCD keys are stored on the physical NVMe firmware, bypassing the KM

Converting the FCD back to a traditional VMDK using standard storage vMotion will strip the encryption and restore access.

The ESXi host lost connection to the Key Management Server (KMS) or the specific Key Encryption Key (KEK) associated with this FCD was rotated and lost.

The FCD cannot be attached to a rescue VM or the original worker node because the hypervisor cannot decrypt the vSAN object without the matching CryptoKeyI

21. A Compliance Auditor is reviewing the storage security baseline for a VCF environment utilizing vVols over iSCSI.

The audit reveals the following configurations regarding how vVols map to the legacy VMFS methodologies.

[UI - Storage Policy and Datastore View]

Datastore Name: vVol-Tier1-Secure

Capacity: 50 TB

Filesystem Type: VVOL

[Policy View]

Rule 1: Storage Container 'SC-Tier1' assigned

Rule 2: Capability 'Array-based Encryption' = True

Which TWO assumptions or configurations represent anti-patterns/misunderstandings regarding vVol Storage Containers compared to traditional VMFS Datastores? (Choose 2.)

Assuming that the Array-based Encryption capability forces the ESXi host to use AES-NI CPU instructions to encrypt data before sending it to the iSCSI target.

Assuming that a 50 TB Storage Container reserves 50 TB of physical array disks exclusively for this datastore; Storage Containers are logical boundaries that often share raw capacity with other containers.

Expecting vCenter to perform distributed locking across the storage container to prevent metadata corruption during multiple VM power-on events.

Attempting to run standard vmkfstools commands to expand the Storage Container's block size to improve large file database performance.

22. Which statement accurately defines the fundamental mechanism of Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) when applied to a Datastore Cluster in a VCF environment?

SDRS extends the vSAN Distributed Object Manager (DOM) capability to external Fibre Channel arrays to provide block-level duplication.

SDRS logically merges multiple LUNs into a single contiguous VMFS namespace, eliminating the need to track individual datastore capacities.

SDRS utilizes network bandwidth metrics to load balance virtual machine I/O across the ESXi hosts' physical network interface cards.

SDRS periodically analyzes datastore space utilization and I/O latency metrics to generate recommendations for initial VM placement and ongoing Storage vMotion operations.

23. An Operations Engineer is managing a VCF Stretched Cluster configured with "Dual Site Mirroring" across Site A and Site B, plus a Witness.

A severe network failure causes "Total Site Isolation" at Site A. Site A completely loses network connectivity to BOTH Site B (the ISL drops) AND the remote Witness Appliance. Site A retains power and local networking.

# vSAN Unicast Agent Status (Post-Failure Snapshot)

Site A Hosts -> Can only ping Site A Hosts.

Site B Hosts -> Can ping Site B Hosts AND Witness.

How do the Unicast Partition Groups and vSphere HA mechanics interact to resolve this specific Disaster Recovery scenario? (Select all that apply.)

Site A forms its own local Partition Group, but because it holds less than 50% of the votes (no Site B, no Witness), DOM strips quorum, locking all storage access for the VMs on Site

The vCenter Server automatically forces the Witness Appliance to migrate to Site A to re-establish quorum.

Virtual machines on Site A will continue to run normally using their local SSD cache to absorb writes indefinitely until the network is restored.

Site B and the Witness form the majority Partition Group (66% of votes). The DOM verifies quorum and makes the Site B data active.

vSphere HA detects that Site A's VMs have lost their datastore and network, triggering a cold restart of all Site A Virtual Machines onto the surviving compute hosts at Site

24. An Infrastructure Manager is investigating application lockups on a VCF 9.0 cluster hosting legacy databases on external iSCSI datastores.

The vSAN Performance View for the ESXi host shows severe backend CPU contention, and the physical ToR switches report link flapping on specific ports.

[vSAN / ESXi Performance View]

Metric: CPU Ready Time (High)

Metric: Storage Path Status (Flipping: Active -> Dead -> Active)

Which TWO statements accurately describe the symptoms and impact of "Path Thrashing" in this specific scenario? (Choose 2.)

Path Thrashing occurs when a marginal network cable or switch port continuously cycles UP/DOWN; the ESXi Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) consumes massive CPU cycles constantly recalculating path statuses and re-initiating iSCSI sessions.

Path Thrashing forces the ESXi host to enter Maintenance Mode automatically to isolate the failing hardware.

The constant UP/DOWN path flapping tricks the vSAN DOM into splitting the data packets into Micro-Stripe components, generating metadata bloat.

The constant path flipping forces standard I/O into the VMkernel retry queues. This I/O stacking causes the SCSI queue depth to fill, leading to the application lockups observed by the users.

Path Thrashing is a beneficial vSAN feature that rapidly rotates I/O paths to evenly distribute the temperature of the NVMe drives.

25. A Network Administrator is auditing capacity policies in a VCF 9.0 environment running vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA).

The administrator queries the SPBM configuration applied to the cluster's base operational objects.

[vSAN Cluster Config Output]

vSAN Default Storage Policy

Storage Pool: ESA-NVMe-Pool

Rule: OSR (Object Space Reservation) = Thin provisioning

Why is the "Object Space Reservation" policy fundamentally different in vSAN ESA compared to the legacy vSAN OSA, and what specific objects still require reservations? (Select all that apply.)

ESA strictly requires OSR=100% when standard Deduplication is enabled.

In vSAN ESA, user data (VMDKs) is ALWAYS strictly Thin Provisioned; the OSR UI option to reserve capacity for VM payload data has been completely deprecated due to the new log-structured metadata mapping.

OSR=100% can still be applied in ESA, but ONLY to the specific "VM Home Namespace" object to ensure swap files and config files have guaranteed allocation during HA events.

The log-structured nature of ESA writes data in append-only sequential stripes; it is mathematically impossible to "reserve" a specific physical sector before it is actually written, rendering traditional OSR definitions obsolete for block data.

In OSA, Thick Provisioning allocated the raw physical sectors on the SATA drive; in ESA, Thick Provisioning pre-allocates NVMe memory pages, guaranteeing zero network congestion.

26. A Network Administrator is auditing the SPBM policies for a new set of Kubernetes stateful applications running on a vSAN ESA cluster.

The security team mandates that the Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) for the audit database must never crash due to a "Datastore Out-of-Space" condition.

# SPBM Policy Spec: K8s-Audit-Policy

Capabilities:

FailuresToTolerate: 2 failures -

RAID-6

StripeWidth: 1

ObjectSpaceReservation: Thick

(100%)

Which TWO statements accurately describe how the ObjectSpaceReservation: Thick rule behaves in vSAN ESA to satisfy the security team's constraint? (Choose 2.)

Enabling Thick provisioning prevents "Out-of-Space" runtime crashes by logically locking the requested capacity inside the DOM metadata upon creation, ensuring the database is guaranteed space even if the rest of the datastore hits 100%.

The Thick provisioning rule forces vSAN ESA to bypass its inline compression engine, wasting massive amounts of capacity.

In vSAN ESA's log-structured architecture, "Thick" is a logical capacity reservation, not a physical block allocation, meaning the unused reserved space does not create unnecessary wear on the NVMe drives.

Thick provisioning guarantees capacity by disabling the Host Rebuild Reserve feature on the ESXi hosts.

Thick provisioning requires the vSphere CSI driver to physically overwrite the full 100% capacity with zeros on the NVMe drives during provisioning (Eager Zeroed).

27. An Infrastructure Manager initiates a Deep Rekey on a fully utilized vSAN ESA database cluster. Within 5 minutes, application owners report severe transaction timeouts.

[vSAN Performance View - Cluster Aggregate]

Metric: CPU Utilization (Jumped from 40% to 95%)

Metric: Network Latency (vSAN Traffic: < 1ms)

Metric: LSOM Congestion (ssd-congestion: Normal)

Metric: DOM Latency (High)

Which TWO statements accurately diagnose this specific performance degradation during the Deep Rekey operation? (Choose 2.)

The high DOM latency combined with normal LSOM congestion proves the physical NVMe drives are NOT the bottleneck; the ESXi CPU is starved, delaying the I/O processing pipeline.

The 95% CPU utilization is caused by the ESXi hypervisor actively decrypting and re-encrypting the AES-256 data streams in software using CPU cycles.

The CPU spike is a false positive generated by the Key Management Server (KMS) polling interval.

The Deep Rekey is generating massive background data movement, saturating the physical 25 GbE network switch buffers, which is shown by the < 1ms latency metric.

Deep Rekey operations explicitly disable the vSAN Distributed Object Manager (DOM), causing the local Guest OS to handle the encryption overhead.

28. A VCF Architect is calculating the performance TCO (Cost per IOPS) difference between upgrading a legacy SAN environment and deploying a new vSAN ESA HCI Cluster.

The architect examines the log output during a simulated application stress test that saturated the backend capabilities of both topologies.

[Log Analysis: vpxd.log - Congestion Events]

# Traditional SAN Cluster

2026-12-01T10:00:15Z WARN vpxd - [Storage] Datastore 'SAN-Tier1' queue depth 64/64 full. Host I/O delayed.

# vSAN ESA Cluster

2026-12-01T10:15:22Z WARN vpxd - [vSAN] Component congestion on ESXi-08. vSAN DOM applying localized backpressure.

2026-12-01T10:15:23Z INFO vpxd - [vSAN] DRS migrating VM 'App-DB' to ESXi-02 to access uncongested storage path.

How does the HCI Operational Model provide a TCO and performance advantage for handling extreme utilization peaks, as demonstrated in this log? (Select all that apply.)

Traditional SANs cannot use vMotion to resolve storage congestion because the storage bottleneck is centralized at the array level, impacting all hosts connected to that LU

The ESA log output indicates a failure of the Deduplication engine, which forces the system to buy additional software licenses to process the I/

In a 3-tier SAN, the LUN queue is a rigid choke point; scaling performance requires physically upgrading the SAN controllers. In HCI, the queue is distributed across all NVMe drives on all hosts, naturally providing massively higher aggregate queues.

HCI allows performance troubleshooting to leverage standard compute resources. If an HCI host is congested, vSphere DRS can simply vMotion the VM to another host with available storage and compute cycles.

The operational cost of expanding the "queue depth" in HCI is effectively zero because it scales automatically as physical hosts and NVMe drives are added to the environment.

29. Which statement accurately describes the function and update mechanism of the vSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) database within vCenter Server?

It is a JSON metadata file that vCenter downloads from VMware to map physical hardware signatures to certified firmware and driver versions, enabling the vSAN Health Service to accurately report cluster compliance.

It is a real-time kernel module inside the ESXi hypervisor that automatically intercepts and patches non-compliant I/O controller firmware during the host boot sequence.

It replaces the standard ESXi hardware abstraction layer, allowing vSAN to bypass standard HBA firmware checks when running the Cluster Partition test.

It requires the VCF administrator to manually compile a SQL database file from the vendor website and import it into the SDDC Manager appliance using the LCM AP

30. A VI Admin is analyzing a performance degradation event for a massive database running on a 6-node vSAN ESA cluster.

Using the vSAN Performance Service, the admin charts the latency across the three distinct vSAN execution layers for the specific VMDK:

[vSAN Performance View - VMDK Layer Breakdown]

Component

Latency

Virtual Machine

(Guest) 22.4 ms

DOM Client

(ESX-01) 22.0 ms

vSAN

Network

19.5 ms

DOM Owner

(ESX-04) 1.2 ms

LSOM

(ESX-04)

0.9 ms

Based on the "Top-Down" methodology and this data matrix, which of the following statements correctly isolate the bottleneck? (Select all that apply.)

The backend physical storage (LSOM on ESX-04) is highly responsive (0.9 ms) and is NOT the cause of the performance issue.

The DOM Owner on ESX-04 is suffering from CPU saturation, causing the 1.2 ms delay before sending data to the LSO

The vSAN Network between ESX-01 and ESX-04 is dropping packets or experiencing switch buffer overflows, as indicated by the 19.5 ms network latency jump.

The high latency is artificially created by Deduplication hash table lookups occurring at the DOM Client layer.

The Virtual Machine is running smoothly because the Guest latency (22.4 ms) closely matches the DOM Client latency (22.0 ms), indicating no vCPU ready-time issues inside the guest.

31. A Solutions Architect is designing the Day 2 operational workflows for a massive CI/CD environment hosted on VCF. Developers frequently request to expand their database PVCs from 100 GB to 500 GB on the fly.

The architect must evaluate the trade-offs of using vSAN ESA with the vSphere CSI Driver for this "Volume Expansion" requirement.

[Storage Policy View - CNS Expansion Config]

Policy:

DB-Expansion-Enabled

AllowVolumeExpansion: True

(K8s)

vSAN ESA Object: Thick

Provisioning

CSI Snapshot Capability:

Enabled

Which of the following statements correctly evaluate the technical constraints and trade-offs of online volume expansion for First Class Disks (FCD) via CSI? (Select all that apply.)

Thick provisioning the vSAN ESA object guarantees that the 400 GB expansion space is reserved instantly in the DOM metadata, preventing the expansion from failing later due to an out-of-space condition.

If the FCD currently has a native vSAN snapshot attached (created via the CSI Snapshot controller), the volume expansion request will fail because vSAN prohibits expanding base disks with active snapshots.

Volume expansion in Kubernetes is purely a control-plane update; the vSphere CSI driver does not interact with the vSAN DOM to allocate additional physical blocks.

Expanding an FCD requires placing the TKG Worker Node into vSphere Maintenance Mode to refresh the virtual SCSI controller limits.

The CSI driver supports online expansion (expanding the FCD while the Pod is running), but the underlying guest OS filesystem must also support live resizing (e.g., ext4 or XFS).

32. An Infrastructure Manager is sizing the network requirements for a vSAN ESA Remote Protection strategy. The organization wants to protect 50 TB of production data with a 15-minute RPO to a secondary site.

The manager evaluates the backend network impact during the initial seed and subsequent incremental replications.

[vSAN Performance View - Inter-Site Link (ISL)]

Outbound Replication

Traffic

Peak Bandwidth: 18

Gbps

Average Bandwidth: 1.2

Gbps

Congestion:

5

Inbound Client I/O

Traffic

Latency: 25ms

(Elevated)

Which of the following factors correctly evaluate the trade-offs and operational constraints of sizing network bandwidth for Remote Protection? (Select all that apply.)

The manager should deploy the vSphere Replication appliance to compress the traffic, as native vSAN Remote Protection cannot compress replication streams.

The initial full sync (baseline) will consume significant bandwidth (up to 18 Gbps shown) and must be throttled to prevent starving active VM I/O on the network.

Reducing the RPO from 60 minutes to 15 minutes decreases the peak bandwidth required for each sync, as fewer delta blocks accumulate between intervals.

vSAN ESA Remote Protection uses deduplication during transit, meaning the 50 TB of data will only consume roughly 10 TB of network bandwidth for the initial seed.

Network congestion caused by high replication traffic directly increases the "Inbound Client I/O Traffic" latency because vSAN shares the same VMkernel adapter for both storage I/O and replication.

33. An L3 Support Engineer is assisting a client with recovering a vSAN Stretched Cluster after a prolonged network outage. The Inter-Site Link (ISL) was down for 6 hours. The cluster has just regained full connectivity between Site A, Site B, and the Witness.

The storage policy is configured as follows:

# Stretched Cluster Policy

Site-Disaster-Tolerance: Dual site mirroring

Failures-to-Tolerate: 1 failure - RAID-5 (Erasure Coding)

The client notices that the storage is operational, but vCenter reports the cluster is heavily congested, and host CPU usage is pinned at 90%.

[vSAN Performance View]

vSAN Resyncing Objects: 1,200

Data to Sync: 4.5 TB

Estimated Time to Completion: 12 Hours

Which TWO architectural behaviors are occurring during this recovery phase, and how should the engineer manage them? (Choose 2.)

vSAN is executing a full resync of all 4.5 TB because the 6-hour outage exceeded the 60-minute CLOM repair timer, invalidating the delta tracking.

The engineer should throttle the Resync I/O in the vSAN UI to prioritize guest VM traffic if the production applications are suffering from the congestion.

The engineer must manually trigger a "Deep Rekey" operation to re-establish the cryptographic trust between the sites before data can synchronize.

vSAN is executing a "delta resync" (proxy view) to synchronize only the 6 hours of data that changed on Site A over to the stale components on Site

34. An Operations Engineer is troubleshooting a highly unusual scenario. Following a firmware upgrade to the Top-of-Rack switches, a VCF Stretched Cluster began experiencing rolling "Datastore Inaccessible" alerts, yet pings between the sites still succeed.

The engineer reviews the vSAN advanced network configuration and I/O limits defined for the cluster.

# vSAN Network Traffic Control Spec

Network_I/O_Control (NIOC): Enabled

System_Traffic_Type: "vSAN"

Shares: High

Reservation: 10 Gbps (10% of 100GbE)

Limit: 20 Gbps (Hard Limit Applied)

How does this specific NIOC anti-pattern interact with the vSAN DOM protocol to cause storage unavailability despite standard network connectivity? (Select all that apply.)

The "Hard Limit: 20 Gbps" artificially throttles vSAN RPC (Remote Procedure Call) traffic; if a DOM resync burst exceeds 20 Gbps, NIOC drops the storage packets at the vDS level.

Standard TCP/IP pings (ICMP) succeed because they are classified as Management traffic by NIOC, blinding the network team to the fact that the storage protocol is being actively choked.

Dropping vSAN CMMDS heartbeat packets due to the NIOC hard limit will cause nodes to isolate, breaking the quorum and immediately locking VM objects as "Inaccessible".

Stretched clusters strictly require the "System_Traffic_Type" to be set to "vSAN_Witness" for Inter-Site Links, bypassing the standard vSAN limits.

vSAN requires the physical Top-of-Rack switches to handle NIOC via DCBx; enforcing it on the vSphere Distributed Switch causes a routing loop.

35. A Compliance Auditor is reviewing the storage policy configurations for a new HCI Mesh environment.

A database team running VMs on the "Web-Client-Cluster" intends to provision their VMs onto the remote "DB-Server-Cluster" datastore. The "DB-Server-Cluster" is highly robust, utilizing 12 hosts and vSAN ESA.

The auditor extracts the storage policy assigned to these VMs:

# SPBM Policy: "Mesh-DB-Policy"

[Policy Rules]

Site-Disaster-Tolerance: None - Standard Cluster

Failures-to-Tolerate: 2 failures - RAID-6 (Erasure Coding)

Encryption: Enabled

[Storage Compatibility]

Datastore: vsanDatastore-DB-Server

Host: Compliant

Which TWO statements represent valid compliance checks and functional behaviors of this HCI Mesh configuration? (Choose 2.)

The storage policy must include a "Data Locality" rule to pin the VM execution to the Server cluster hosts to minimize network latency.

The RAID-6 erasure coding calculations for the database VMs will consume CPU cycles on the "Web-Client-Cluster" hosts, not the "DB-Server-Cluster" hosts.

Encryption is invalid in this topology; HCI Mesh cannot support Data-in-Transit encryption between Client and Server clusters.

The "Failures-to-Tolerate" rule validates against the host count of the "DB-Server-Cluster" (12 hosts), not the "Web-Client-Cluster".

36. Which statement accurately defines the fundamental difference in physical drive topology and caching strategy between vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) and the legacy Original Storage Architecture (OSA)?

vSAN OSA supports physical Hardware RAID controllers for the capacity tier, whereas ESA strictly requires HBA pass-through.

vSAN OSA utilizes a two-tier architecture where dedicated NVMe drives absorb write I/O (Cache tier) before destaging to SAS SSDs (Capacity tier); vSAN ESA eliminates the dedicated cache drives entirely, creating a unified single-tier storage pool where every NVMe drive contributes to both caching and capacity.

vSAN ESA introduces a third "DRAM Cache" tier strictly for metadata, whereas OSA only used flash drives.

vSAN ESA requires grouping physical drives into logical "Disk Groups" of up to 7 capacity drives, whereas OSA allowed dynamic disk adding.

37. A Solutions Architect is calculating the network bandwidth saturation for a specific VMDK under heavy write load in a vSAN ESA cluster. The available Top-of-Rack switch throughput is limited to 25 GbE.

The VM generates 500 MB/s of raw write data.

The architect evaluates two different Storage Policies applied to this specific VM:

[SPBM Configuration Options]

Policy A: Failures To Tolerate: 1 (RAID-1 Mirroring)

Policy B: Failures To Tolerate: 1 (RAID-5 Erasure Coding)

How do these different SPBM policies directly alter the actual "on-the-wire" network traffic profile for vSAN, and what is the impact on the 25 GbE fabric? (Select all that apply.)

Policy A (RAID-1) generates 1000 MB/s of total backend network traffic (a 2.0x multiplier) because the DOM Client must simultaneously send the 500 MB/s data payload to both Mirror 1 and Mirror 2 across the network.

Policy B (RAID-5) significantly reduces the network bandwidth multiplier compared to RAID-1, because the erasure coding algorithm spreads parity overhead (1.33x) rather than duplicating the full dataset.

vSAN ESA compresses the data BEFORE it leaves the host (DOM Client level); therefore, if the VM generates highly compressible data (e.g., 2:1 ratio), Policy B will only push ~332 MB/s across the network, preserving the 25 GbE switch buffers.

Both policies consume zero network bandwidth for reads when the "Site Locality" feature is enabled.

Switching from Policy A to Policy B doubles the network traffic overhead because RAID-5 requires a 4th parity node.

38. An Infrastructure Manager is actively monitoring the RVC (Ruby vSphere Console) output during a major data ingestion event into a VCF 9.0 cluster.

The cluster has 100 TB of raw capacity. The "Host Rebuild Reserve" is enabled and calculated at 10 TB. The "Operations Reserve" is strictly enforced at 10 TB.

[RVC Output: vsan.cluster_info]

Total Capacity: 100 TB

Used Capacity: 81 TB (81%)

DOM Client Throttling: Active (Backpressure applied to 5 VMs)

Why is the vSAN DOM Client aggressively throttling virtual machines at 81% utilization, and what is the methodology used to calculate this boundary? (Select all that apply.)

Disabling the "Host Rebuild Reserve" in the UI would immediately relieve the throttling condition and release 10 TB of addressable space to the VMs, though at the cost of high availability during a host failure.

The "Usable/Free" capacity in HCI is mathematically defined as: Total Raw - (Used + Ops Reserve + Rebuild Reserve).

The throttling is a false positive generated by standard vmkfstools heartbeat checks when the deduplication engine runs out of RA

The SDDC Manager automated agent forces the throttle because the 80% mark violates standard Kubernetes persistent volume claims.

At 81 TB used, adding the 10 TB Ops Reserve and 10 TB Rebuild Reserve equals 101 T

The cluster has mathematically breached the absolute physical barrier, triggering the DOM to apply performance backpressure to prevent the filesystem from locking up.

39. A SOC Analyst is reviewing the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) output for a 12-node VCF cluster to verify Key Provider consistency.

[RVC Output: vsan.encryption_info ~cluster]

Host Encryption KMS Server KEK ID

esx-01 Enabled VCF-KMS-HA a1b2c3d4...

esx-02 Enabled VCF-KMS-HA a1b2c3d4...

esx-03 Enabled <Unreachable> a1b2c3d4...

esx-03 recently experienced a management network partition.

Why do the Virtual Machines hosted on esx-03 continue to read and write encrypted data seamlessly despite the Unreachable KMS status shown in RVC? (Select all that apply.)

The KEK is persistently cached on the physical NVMe drives; ESXi reads the key from the disk during isolation.

ESXi stores the KEK in secure volatile memory (RAM); since the host was running when the network dropped, the key is already loaded, and standard I/O pipelines do not require active KMS polling.

esx-03 automatically negotiated a peer-to-peer key exchange with esx-01 over the vSAN VMkernel network to retrieve the missing KE

The vsan.encryption_info command only reports the control plane status of the vCenter-to-Host linkage; the dataplane inside esx-03 functions independently of the management network.

esx-03 disabled encryption dynamically to maintain availability during the partition.

40. Which statement accurately defines the core architectural characteristic of VMware Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN?

HCI replaces the traditional network switch fabric with software-defined networking, but retains the legacy 3-tier storage arrays.

HCI aggregates the CPU and Memory from ESXi hosts into a unified resource pool while relying on external Fibre Channel storage arrays for persistent data.

HCI collapses traditional storage arrays and storage networks into a software layer embedded within the ESXi kernel, pooling locally attached storage devices into a single datastore.

HCI utilizes dedicated storage controller virtual appliances on each host to virtualize local disks and present them via the iSCSI protocol.

41. A Network Administrator is securing the physical connections for the VCF out-of-band management network.

The administrator notes that the vSAN Skyline Health dashboard is reporting a warning: vCenter and KMS communication link is unencrypted.

[Log Analysis: vpxd.log]

2026-11-20T09:10:00Z WARN vpxd - [KMIP] KMS Provider 'Vault-01' using HTTP proxy.

2026-11-20T09:10:01Z ERROR vpxd - [KMIP] TLS handshake bypassed.

How does the vSphere Native Key Provider (NKP) introduced in recent vSphere versions solve this specific network boundary complexity compared to the legacy External KMS model? (Select all that apply.)

Native Key Provider operates entirely within the vCenter Server cluster, removing the dependency on external network firewalls and eliminating the need for complex external KMIP server certificates.

Native Key Provider uses the vSAN storage network (MTU 9000) to distribute keys instead of the management network, ensuring the link is always encrypted.

NKP is strictly for VM-level encryption and cannot be used to encrypt the vSAN datastore storage pool.

With NKP, the vCenter Server itself becomes the Key Server, generating and distributing the keys internally, which significantly simplifies the VCF deployment topology.

If the vCenter Server running NKP crashes, the ESXi hosts can automatically generate their own KEKs.

42. A CTO is auditing the billing and licensing model for a new VCF 9.0 environment. The environment consists of a standard vSAN ESA cluster (hyper-converged) and a centralized vSAN Max cluster (Disaggregated storage-only).

[UI - vSAN Performance View > Licensing Status]

Cluster A (vSAN ESA - HCI): 16 Hosts, 512 Cores, 200 TiB

Cluster B (vSAN Max - Storage Only): 8 Hosts, 256 Cores, 1 PiB

Which statement accurately defines the fundamental difference in how these two VCF architectures consume vSAN license entitlements?

Cluster A (HCI) is licensed traditionally per CPU core (VCF Subscription), whereas Cluster B (vSAN Max) abandons the core metric and is licensed strictly on a "per-TiB of raw capacity" subscription model.

vSAN Max requires a specialized hardware DPU license for the Top-of-Rack switches, whereas ESA uses software-only keys.

The compute nodes mounting the vSAN Max cluster must double their VCF license consumption to cover the remote storage array connectivity.

Both clusters consume the exact same "per-core" VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) subscription license model, meaning the 1 PiB of storage in Cluster B incurs no additional capacity costs.

43. A Cloud Administrator is troubleshooting a complex VCF failure where a virtual machine (VM-DB-01) became completely inaccessible.

The environment utilizes a deeply integrated storage architecture:

- VM-DB-01 runs on Compute-Cluster-01 (Client).

- The VM's storage policy dictates FTT=1 (RAID-1).

- The storage resides on Storage-Cluster-02 (Server), which is configured as a vSAN Stretched Cluster spanning Site A and Site B.

A massive fiber cut occurs, completely isolating Site A from the rest of the network. Compute-Cluster-01 and Site B remain connected to each other and the Witness.

The administrator pulls the vmkernel.log from Compute-Cluster-01 hosts:

2026-10-14T09:00:15Z ERROR cmmds - Cannot reach any hosts in Storage-Cluster-02 (Site A).

2026-10-14T09:00:16Z WARN vsan - Remote datastore 'vsanDatastore-Storage-02' object 5543... entering DEGRADED state.

2026-10-14T09:00:18Z INFO vsan - Remote datastore components shifted to Site B. Quorum maintained.

2026-10-14T09:00:30Z ERROR vobd - VM 'VM-DB-01' reported I/O timeout.

Given the interaction between HCI Mesh and Stretched Cluster mechanics, why did the VM experience an I/O timeout despite the log indicating "Quorum maintained"? (Select all that apply.)

The compute cluster experienced a temporary APD during the convergence period while the vSAN DOM redirected the remote I/O paths from Site A to Site

The Read Locality mechanism of the Stretched Cluster forced the compute host to continue requesting reads from the dead Site A nodes until the 60-second I/O timeout expired.

The fiber cut severed the native vSAN network route between Compute-Cluster-01 and Site B, preventing the compute host from talking to the surviving storage nodes.

HCI Mesh inherently does not support Stretched Clusters; the configuration was invalid from day one.

44. A Storage Administrator is performing a post-deployment validation on a VCF 9.0 Workload Domain. The design utilized the vSAN Sizer tool to forecast capacity for a 6-node Stretched Cluster (3 nodes per site).

The Sizer output predicted a specific "Free Capacity" based on an FTT=1 (RAID-1) Local + Dual Site Mirroring policy.

The administrator queries the cluster object distribution using the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) to verify if the actual component layout matches the Sizer's assumptions.

[RVC Output: vsan.obj_status_report ~cluster]

Object Type: Virtual Disk (hard disk 1)

Policy: PFTT=1 (Mirror), SFTT=1 (RAID-1)

Component Layout:

Site A:

- Component 1: 50 GB

(Active)

- Component 2: 50 GB

(Active)

- Witness: 4 KB

(Active)

Site B:

- Component 3: 50 GB

(Active)

- Component 4: 50 GB

(Active)

- Witness: 4 KB

(Active)

Witness Site:

- Witness: 4 KB

(Active)

Why does this RVC output validate that the Sizer tool correctly estimated a 4.0x capacity overhead for this object, and how does this affect cluster expansion planning? (Select all that apply.)

The layout demonstrates the "Nested Fault Domain" concept, confirming that adding one node to Site A requires adding one node to Site B to maintain the symmetrical 4.0x layout.

The "Dual Site Mirroring" creates two copies of the data (one at Site A, one at Site B), which acts as a 2.0x multiplier.

The "SFTT=1 (RAID-1)" local protection creates two copies of the data *within each site*, applying another 2.0x multiplier (2.0 x 2.0 = 4.0x total overhead).

The 4 KB Witness components in Site A and Site B consume the same licensed storage capacity as the 50 GB data components, skewing the Sizer results.

45. A Storage Administrator is troubleshooting a vSAN Stretched Cluster configuration. The administrator successfully executed a Deep Rekey operation on the Preferred and Secondary data sites, but suspects the Witness Appliance was excluded from the cryptographic rotation.

The administrator queries the encryption status of the Witness Appliance via the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC):

[RVC Output: vsan.encryption_info ~cluster]

Host: esx-site-a-01 | DEK Gen: 2 | KEK ID: kms-ext-key-002

Host: esx-site-b-01 | DEK Gen: 2 | KEK ID: kms-ext-key-002

Host: witness-01 | DEK Gen: 1 | KEK ID: kms-ext-key-001

Based on the RVC output and Stretched Cluster mechanics, what are the implications of this state, and how is the interaction handled? (Select all that apply.)

This inconsistent state prevents the data hosts from forming a quorum with the Witness because the CMMDS metadata cannot be decrypted across different KEK versions.

The output confirms the Witness Appliance is in an inconsistent state (DEK Gen: 1 vs data hosts Gen: 2); the Deep Rekey workflow likely failed to reach the Witness via the management network.

The administrator must initiate a manual Deep Rekey specifically targeting the witness-01 host to bring its DEK generation and KEK ID in line with the data sites.

The Witness Appliance failed to Deep Rekey because it runs a different vSAN storage protocol that does not support Disk Encryption Keys (DEKs).

46. A VCF Architect is designing the automated lifecycle management (LCM) workflow for a massive 48-node vSAN ESA cluster using Dell ReadyNodes.

The design integrates vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) with the OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) Hardware Support Manager (HSM).

# vLCM Cluster Image JSON Spec

"image": {

"esx_version":

"8.0 U2",

"vendor_addon":

"Dell_Customization",

"hsm_package":

"OMIVV_Firmware_Baseline_v4"

}

How does the vCenter HCL Database interact with this automated vLCM firmware remediation loop? (Select all that apply.)

The integration requires disabling the vSAN Health Service so that the OMIVV hardware manager can assume absolute control over the RAID controller configurations.

vLCM ignores the vSAN HCL database entirely when a Hardware Support Manager is present, relying solely on the OEM vendor's internal certification matrix.

If the HCL database determines the HSM firmware baseline is incompatible, the SDDC Manager compliance pre-check will block the remediation task to prevent corrupting the storage pool.

Before applying the image, vLCM queries the active vSAN HCL Database to validate that the specific NVMe firmware contained in the "OMIVV Baseline" is officially certified for vSAN ESA 8.0 U2.

Updating the HCL database inside vCenter automatically flashes the new firmware onto the physical Dell servers during the next standard maintenance window.

47. A CTO is defining the StorageClass strategy for a new Tanzu Kubernetes cluster running on vSAN ESA. The workloads are heavy write-intensive databases.

The CTO is debating whether to enforce "Object Space Reservation: Thick" (100% reserved) in the SPBM policy attached to the K8s StorageClass, or leave it as the default "Thin" provisioned.

[vSAN Performance / Capacity View Projection]

Option 1: Thick Provisioning (100% OSR) -> 50 TB PVCs consume 50 TB immediately.

Option 2: Thin Provisioning (0% OSR) -> 50 TB PVCs consume only written data (e.g., 5 TB initially).

Which of the following statements correctly evaluate the trade-offs of enforcing "Thick" provisioning via a Kubernetes StorageClass on vSAN ESA? (Select all that apply.)

In vSAN ESA, "Thick" provisioning does not pre-allocate physical NVMe blocks; instead, it logically reserves the capacity quota in the DOM to guarantee space for the pod's lifetime.

Using "Thin" provisioning creates a race condition where thousands of K8s pods could oversubscribe the datastore, causing an APD event when physical space runs out.

Thick provisioning on vSAN ESA accelerates database write performance by zeroing out the physical NVMe blocks during PVC creation.

Thick provisioning prevents "Out of Space" (OOS) runtime crashes for database pods; if the datastore fills up, the thick-provisioned database is already guaranteed its 50 T

Kubernetes CSI drivers are incompatible with Thick provisioning; the feature was deprecated in vSphere 8.0.

48. An Infrastructure Manager is preparing a VCF 9.0 Workload Domain for a major lifecycle upgrade via SDDC Manager. Before allowing the update to proceed, the manager runs the vSAN Health Check.

A critical failure is flagged regarding the I/O Controller firmware.

The manager reviews the vpxd.log to investigate the interaction between the health check and the hardware state:

2026-11-20T10:05:12Z INFO vpxd - [vSAN Health] Running check: "Controller Firmware is VMware Certified"

2026-11-20T10:05:15Z WARN vpxd - Host esx-05.corp.local: Controller "LSI MegaRAID 3508" running Firmware "24.21.0-0019".

2026-11-20T10:05:15Z WARN vpxd - HCL Database (Version: 104) requires Firmware "24.21.0-0148" for vSAN 8.0 ESA.

2026-11-20T10:05:16Z ERROR vpxd - [vSAN Health] Check "Controller Firmware" FAILED.

What is the correct sequence of logic and architectural principles the manager must understand to resolve this Deep Fusion scenario involving Health Checks and HCL updates? (Select all that apply.)

The health check can be bypassed by acknowledging the alarm in vCenter, allowing the SDDC Manager update to force-flash the firmware during the upgrade process.

vSAN ESA eliminates the need for I/O controller compliance checks because NVMe devices attach directly to the PCIe bus without a controller.

Updating the vSAN HCL JSON database to the latest version might resolve the alert if VMware has recently certified the older firmware (24.21.0-0019) for the target vSAN version.

The health check failure is a hard blocker for VCF upgrades; SDDC Manager will refuse to upgrade the vSphere layer if the vSAN underlying hardware is non-compliant with the target version.

If the HCL database is already current, the manager must use vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) to actively patch the physical controller firmware to the required version ("0148") before proceeding.

49. A VI Admin is deploying a developer namespace in a VCF 9.0 environment. The developers rely heavily on Kubernetes Persistent Volume snapshots for their CI/CD pipelines. They often generate up to 50 snapshots per day per volume.

The Admin runs a debug command to inspect the snapshot tree for a heavy-use vSAN ESA volume.

[root@esx-03:~] esxcli vsan debug object health summary get

Object UUID: 554350... (FCD: Dev-DB-PVC)

Format: vSAN ESA Log-Structured

Snapshot Count: 45

Read Latency: 0.8 ms

How does the deep fusion of vSAN ESA mechanics and the Snapshot architectural model allow this workload to function efficiently compared to the legacy OSA VMFS approach? (Select all that apply.)

In legacy OSA (VMFS), snapshots utilize "Redo Logs" (SEsparse). Reading data from a VM with 45 snapshots requires the I/O to traverse a 45-layer deep disk chain, causing severe latency degradation.

ESA snapshots require the virtual machine to be powered off during creation to ensure memory state consistency across the B-Tree map.

vSAN ESA native snapshots utilize a Log-Structured B-Tree pointer mechanism; capturing a snapshot is a millisecond metadata operation that does not create a secondary delta file.

Deleting or consolidating a 45-snapshot chain in OSA triggers a massive "VM Stun" event to merge the block data, whereas ESA deletes snapshots instantly by dropping the B-Tree pointers in the background.

vSAN ESA increases the maximum supported snapshot limit per object from 32 (in OSA) to 200, unlocking Continuous Data Protection (CDP) style workflows.

50. A SOC Analyst is investigating a recurring incident where a mission-critical web server becomes completely unresponsive to network pings for approximately 45 seconds every night at 2:00 AM.

The analyst checks the ESXi CLI logs corresponding to that exact timestamp:

[root@esx-03:~] vim-cmd vmsvc/get.tasklist 42

Task: Snapshot.remove

Status: Running (99% complete)

Consolidation Rate: 85 MB/s

Memory Stun Required: True

Based on the vim-cmd output and vSAN OSA snapshot mechanics, which TWO statements accurately diagnose this recurring outage? (Choose 2.)

The ESXi host ran out of physical memory to process the snapshot, forcing it to swap the VM's RAM to the vSAN datastore.

This daily event is directly triggered by the automated Backup Solution (e.g., Veeam/Avamar), which creates a snapshot at 2:00 AM to copy data and then commands vSphere to delete/consolidate it.

The 45-second network outage is a "VM Stun" event; during the final phase of snapshot consolidation in OSA, the hypervisor must freeze the Guest OS CPU and network stack to merge the final in-flight memory and disk blocks.

The VM has exceeded the maximum supported limit of 32 snapshots, causing the vSAN DOM Client to forcibly crash the virtual machine.

The system is infected with a crypto-miner; the 85 MB/s consolidation rate represents unauthorized data exfiltration masked as a backup task.

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