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

The requirements specify:

Large-scale migration (800 workloads).

No downtime.

Strict change window (4 weeks).

HCX Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV) is the only method that combines large-scale migration efficiency with zero downtime:

Workloads are replicated in advance.

During the cutover, a vMotion-like switchover completes with no outage.

Other methods:

Cross vCenter vMotion works for live moves but is not efficient for hundreds of VMs within a short timeline.

HCX OS Assisted Migration is for physical-to-virtual or non-vSphere workloads (not applicable).

HCX Bulk Migration is efficient but introduces downtime during cutover.

Thus, HCX RAV best meets the no-downtime, large-scale requirement.

A stretched cluster model allows synchronous replication between sites with RPO = 0, ensuring no data loss.

Since the datacenters are within low-latency (<5ms) distance, stretched vSAN clusters with fault domains can span across them.

Other options:

A/B (disaster recovery models) rely on asynchronous replication, introducing potential data loss.

C (multi-rack fault domains) improves rack-level resiliency, not site-level protection.

Thus, the correct design is a VCF fleet with stretched cluster model across fault domains.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture Overview and Operations Integration Guide state that VCF Operations, combined with VCF Operations for Logs, provides a unified monitoring and observability solution across the entire VCF fleet. The documentation specifies:

“Integrating VCF Operations with VCF Operations for Logs and VCF Automation provides a single-pane-of-glass for monitoring metrics, events, and flows across all management and workload domains.”

Furthermore, the High Availability deployment model for VCF Operations for Logs is required to meet the 99.9% SLA for continuous availability of monitoring data.

“VCF Operations for Logs can be deployed in High Availability mode to ensure log continuity and fault tolerance.”

Thus, the architect must:

Integrate VCF Operations with both Logs and Automation (B, D) for unified visibility.

Deploy Logs in High Availability (F) mode to achieve the 99.9% availability SLA.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Operations Design Guide — “Integrated Operations and Log Monitoring Architecture.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Integration Guide — “VCF Operations and Logs HA Deployment.”

This is a requirement because it specifies what the solution must deliver. VMware encryption requires enabling VM Encryption with vSphere VM Encryption policies or vSAN encryption.

Constraints are design limitations (e.g., budget, existing hardware).

Risks are potential negative outcomes (e.g., encryption introduces CPU overhead).

Assumptions are unverified statements taken as true (e.g., "all VMs can support encryption").

Thus, “All VMs must be encrypted” is a security requirement.

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

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

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

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

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

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

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

During VCF bring-up, SDDC Manager requires control of a clean vCenter deployment. Since the existing environment already has a vCenter managing the clusters, the vCenter VM must be migrated to a standalone host so that VCF bring-up can properly deploy its own vCenter instance.

A: NSX deployment happens later during WLD creation, not at fleet bring-up.

C: vSAN isn’t auto-configured — it requires explicit design.

D: VCF uses vLCM images, not baselines, post-deployment.

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

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

In the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, VCF Automation supports multi-tenancy through the creation of separate organizations, each with its own catalog, users, and identity source. The document under “Organizations in VCF Automation” explains:

“Organizations in VCF Automation are created by the provider administrator in the Provider Management Portal. Each organization has its own identity source and resource allocations. The organization administrator can then configure its own self-service catalog and governance policies.”

By configuring separate organizations for Development and Production, the architect ensures logical segregation of resources, catalogs, and permissions. Each organization can manage its own projects, namespaces, and service catalogs independently, meeting both the self-service and segregation requirements.

This design aligns with VMware’s provider–tenant model, where each tenant (organization) operates autonomously while still being managed under a common provider infrastructure.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Design Guide — “Organizations in VCF Automation: All Apps and VM Apps Organizations.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Self-Service Catalog in VCF Automation.”

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

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

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

In contrast:

Performance focuses on throughput and latency.

Availability ensures uptime and fault tolerance.

Recoverability deals with restoration after failure.

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

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

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

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

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Guide under the VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) Lifecycle Management section, the management and orchestration of Kubernetes clusters within VCF occur through three controller layers. These are explicitly identified as the Virtual Machine Service, the Cluster API (CAPI), and the Cloud Provider Plugin (CPP).

The Virtual Machine Service (VMS) acts as the integration layer between vSphere and Kubernetes, enabling Kubernetes objects (such as clusters and machines) to be represented as vSphere resources. The Cluster API provides declarative lifecycle management for Kubernetes clusters, automating provisioning, upgrades, and scaling through Kubernetes-native APIs. The Cloud Provider Plugin integrates the cluster lifecycle with vSphere infrastructure management, ensuring alignment of networking, storage, and compute resource operations.

Together, these three controller layers deliver a fully automated, policy-driven, and API-centric approach to cluster provisioning, maintenance, and scaling in VCF-based environments, supporting consistent lifecycle operations across workload domains. This framework replaces traditional manual configuration and ensures full compliance with VCF’s software-defined architecture principles.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture and Design Guide – “VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) Lifecycle Management Architecture.”

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Detailed Design Library – “VKS Cluster Architecture: Virtual Machine Service, Cluster API, and Cloud Provider Plugin.”

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Reference Design – “Cluster Lifecycle Controller Layers in VCF Kubernetes Service.”

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.

Since the constraint is existing stretched cluster model, the design assumes a single cluster across two sites.

To meet the minimize downtime requirement, the Single Management Zone Supervisor with HA control plane ensures control plane resiliency within that stretched cluster.

Options with “Simple Availability” do not meet the high availability requirement. Options with three zones are not applicable because the constraint specifies a stretched cluster model.

As defined in the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture and Design Guide, the vSAN Compute Cluster Storage Model is designed to allow compute and storage scaling to occur independently. The guide specifies:

“A vSAN Compute Cluster is a vSphere cluster that does not contribute storage resources to the vSAN datastore. Instead, it consumes storage from a remote vSAN cluster through HCI Mesh. This architecture enables compute and network resources to scale independently of storage.”

This design provides flexibility in disaggregated architectures, allowing organizations to expand compute clusters without needing to expand vSAN capacity nodes and vice versa. Such a model is particularly useful for data-intensive workloads or environments with unpredictable growth patterns in compute versus storage.

Other options, such as vSAN ESA Storage Model or vSAN ESA Storage Cluster Model, represent Enhanced Storage Architecture configurations but do not inherently separate compute scaling. Hence, the correct answer is the vSAN Compute Cluster Storage Model, as it uniquely supports independent scalability while maintaining centralized management under the VCF architecture.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture and Design Guide — “vSAN Compute Cluster Model (Disaggregated Storage Architecture)” (pp. 870–875).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design Guide — “Compute and Storage Independent Scaling using HCI Mesh.”

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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According to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 documentation, when a stretched cluster is deployed across sites with sub-5ms latency and high-speed interconnects, vSAN can be configured for zero RPO (Recovery Point Objective), ensuring 100% data consistency and availability in the event of a site failure. vSAN supports co-locating management and application workloads and provides the shared storage functionality with automatic failover capabilities.

Additionally, vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) provide granular control of virtual machine storage, and when backed by a storage system that supports replication and failover across sites (with support for VASA 3.0 or later), vVols can meet the same requirements for data availability and disaster recovery.

In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) with composite images is the recommended method for managing host lifecycle. However, when using hardware of different generations, it's not advisable to use a single composite image across clusters with hardware inconsistencies due to potential compatibility mismatches with firmware and drivers.

By using separate vLCM composite images for each cluster (i.e., management and workload), the architect ensures that each cluster's image is optimized for its specific hardware generation, reducing the risk of driver/firmware issues during updates or drift remediation.

This design aligns with the principle of cluster-level lifecycle independence, especially important when working with a mix of hardware generations.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) defines how quickly a system/service must be restored after a disruption. In this scenario, the infrastructure components should be fully functional within 4 hours.

This contrasts with RPO, which measures data loss tolerance. RTO focuses on downtime tolerance.

VMware Cloud Foundation documentation on BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery) explicitly defines these metrics during availability planning.

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.

Deploying a single VCF Operations instance (central management point) while placing Cloud Proxies or Collector nodes at remote sites enables local data ingestion. This ensures remote-site resilience (REQ‑002), centralized visibility for IT users (REQ‑001), and data sovereignty compliance because data can remain within local jurisdictions (REQ‑003). This model aligns with VMware’s recommended best practice for multi-site monitoring with minimal duplication of management infrastructure.

D: Setting UserVars.SuppressShellWarning = 0 ensures warnings are shown when shell access is used, improving auditability and compliance.

E: Using certificates signed by a trusted military Root CA aligns with security compliance standards for certificate trust and chain of custody.

Options A and C are operational best practices, but not military hardening. B is about operations automation, not compliance-level hardening.

The Managed Telegraf Agent provides full observability and is centrally managed through VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations). It is ideal for scenarios where both OS and infrastructure application metrics are needed, such as in the Fully Managed and OS Managed services. This meets the requirement for monitoring while minimizing manual overhead. The Self-Managed service does not require agent deployment, as only VM-level metrics are needed.

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.

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.

These are classic Recoverability metrics. The Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) directly relate to how fast and how much data can be recovered after a failure or disaster event. The architect must ensure the VCF deployment includes recovery mechanisms, such as stretched clusters or backup/replication technology, that meet these defined RTO/RPO targets.

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.

As per the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide (Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Model Framework), a conceptual model defines what the solution will deliver at a high level — focusing on major components and interactions without specifying implementation details or configurations.

The statement “Users will connect to the application servers via the NSX Advanced Load Balancer” fits this definition because it identifies a functional relationship between solution components (users and applications) and introduces the NSX ALB as a key service enabler — without going into configuration or performance specifics.

In contrast:

Option A (MTTR 6 hours) defines a service level target, part of non-functional design.

Option B (stretched L2 networks) and C (vSphere HA parameter tuning) belong to the logical and physical design stages respectively, as they involve implementation specifics.

Therefore, D represents a conceptual model statement, describing service delivery intent and architectural interaction.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — “Conceptual, Logical, and Physical Design Layers Explained.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Architecture Design Standards — “Conceptual Model: High-Level Service Definition and Interaction.”