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

Advanced Memory Tiering with NVMe optimizes memory performance, essential for workloads that are latency-sensitive.

NSX Enhanced Data Path (EDP) is specifically designed for high-performance, low-latency packet processing, critical in real-time applications.Options like Global Deduplication or Deep Snapshots can negatively impact latency due to additional processing overhead.

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.

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

The VCF 9.0.1 Design Guide and vSphere HA Design Best Practices define N+1 as a configuration where one additional host is reserved to ensure full workload recovery in case of a host failure. It specifies:

“To satisfy N+1 availability, the number of cluster hosts must exceed the required workload hosts by one to provide failover capacity.”

Therefore, for five resource-intensive VMs, a six-host cluster (D) ensures that in case of one host failure, performance and availability SLAs are maintained.

In addition, using automated placement rules (A) (e.g., anti-affinity rules) ensures that mission-critical VMs are separated across hosts, minimizing risk of concurrent failure. Resource pools (B) only control scheduling priority and do not affect availability, and keeping all VMs together (C) violates redundancy principles.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — “N+1 Cluster Sizing and Availability Considerations.” (pp. 902–905)

VMware vSphere HA Best Practices — “VM Placement Rules and Anti-Affinity Configuration.”

Conceptual model items are categorized as requirements, assumptions, risks, and constraints:

A is a clear requirement, aligned with the business objective of continuous uptime and availability.

B is a valid risk, as the availability of the external internet provider impacts the user experience.

F is an assumption, implying that budget will not be a limitation in achieving the desired level of performance.

Items like C are too technically specific for the conceptual layer. D directly contradicts the business objective, and E relates more to operational constraints rather than high-level design goals.

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

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

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

In contrast:

Performance focuses on throughput and latency.

Availability ensures uptime and fault tolerance.

Recoverability deals with restoration after failure.

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

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

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

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

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

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

In contrast:

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

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

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

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

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

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

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.

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.”

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Documentation (p.5802–5804), administrators can configure resource limits for vSphere Namespaces, which define how much CPU, memory, and storage can be consumed.

The guide specifies under “Set Resource Limits to a vSphere Namespace”:

“As a vSphere administrator, you can set resource limits and container defaults on a vSphere Namespace. Options include CPU, Memory, and Storage. Container defaults set CPU limits, CPU requests, memory requests, and memory limits for containers within the Namespace.”

These limits provide governance and ensure that workloads deployed within a namespace do not exceed predefined consumption levels, maintaining cluster resource balance and preventing noisy-neighbor scenarios.

The document further clarifies that storage limits are applied per storage policy and CPU and memory limits define the total reserved compute capacity available to workloads and pods running in the namespace.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Set Resource Limits to a vSphere Namespace” (p.5802–5803)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Self-Service Namespace Template Provisioning Workflow.”

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.

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.”

Logical design decisions specify how features are configured to meet conceptual requirements. In VMware Cloud Foundation logical design, tuning VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) parameters such as latency sensitivity for workload clusters is explicitly part of logical design because it directly impacts workload performance and cluster behavior. Options A and B are conceptual or operational, and option D is a standard best practice at the physical design layer. VMware documents emphasize that logical design choices define how features (like DRS, HA, and vSAN policies) are implemented .

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (Based on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.3 and 9.0.1 Guides):

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.3 Disaster Recovery Planning Guide emphasizes that testing and validation of DR plans must occur regularly and whenever infrastructure changes are made. It states:

“You can perform test runs periodically to ensure the existing disaster recovery plan works with underlying infrastructure and the configured RPO limit. VMware Live Recovery recommends users perform planned migration at regular intervals to validate the integrity of the existing DR plan.”

Additionally, the VCF 9.0.1 Design Blueprints specify that a well-defined process for reviewing and updating DR documentation between changes ensures continuity and compliance with defined Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

Thus, the correct mitigation action is to establish a structured change management process that includes DR plan updates and monthly end-to-end validation tests. Simply limiting change frequency (option C) or setting replication intervals (option D) does not ensure DR plan integrity.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.3 Disaster Recovery Guide — “Validating and Testing DR Plans with VMware Live Recovery.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — “Change Management and DR Validation Requirements.”

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.

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.

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.

BGP loop prevention relies on unique AS numbers. If the same AS is reused, routes may be dropped. In NSX VPC designs, assigning a unique private AS per Tier-0 gateway ensures clean routing without triggering loop detection.

A: Timer adjustment affects convergence, not loop detection.

C: iBGP with physical routers is non-standard and doesn’t solve the loop issue.

D: TEP traffic is unrelated to BGP routing loops.

According to the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, the officially supported solution for backing up and restoring workloads running on VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) clusters is Velero, specifically the Velero Plugin for vSphere. The documentation explicitly states:

“You can backup and restore workloads running on VKS clusters by using Velero. The Velero Plugin for vSphere provides a solution for backing up and restoring workloads running on vSphere Pods and VKS clusters.”

Velero integrates with vSphere through a plugin that manages persistent volume snapshots and metadata backups to an S3-compatible object store. This provides data protection for both stateless and stateful Kubernetes workloads.

While Restic is mentioned in conjunction with Velero for additional support in some environments, it cannot operate standalone in VKS environments. Site Recovery Manager and VMware Live Recovery are used for virtual machine–based disaster recovery, not containerized workloads. Therefore, Velero is the correct and VMware-supported tool for VKS workload backup and recovery.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Backing Up and Restoring VKS Clusters and Workloads” (pp. 5879–5887)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Install and Configure the Velero Plugin for vSphere on a Supervisor” (pp. 5880–5885)

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.

Per the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Framework, performance validation must ensure the infrastructure can sustain peak workload loads while meeting defined SLAs. Two essential validation techniques recommended are:

Stress Testing – Used to evaluate system stability and response under extreme load conditions to ensure the infrastructure can handle transient peaks beyond average operations.

Load Simulation in a Staging Environment – Used to emulate production workloads and transaction patterns to validate scalability, vSAN throughput, and resource elasticity.

The documentation emphasizes that “stress and scalability testing must be conducted using representative workloads in a controlled environment before production cutover,” ensuring predictable system behavior and compliance with SLA targets.

Other options such as recovery testing (A) or vendor benchmarks (E) serve disaster recovery and reference purposes, not performance validation. Deploying directly to production (D) without validation contradicts VCF design best practices.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Guide — “Performance and Scalability Validation Methods.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Overview — “Workload Validation and Stress Testing Framework.”

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.”

A single workload domain in VCF maps to a single vCenter instance. When the host limit for that vCenter is reached (typically ~1000 hosts per vCenter), the correct and supported scale-out design is to deploy a second VI workload domain, which comes with its own dedicated vCenter instance, allowing continued expansion without affecting the existing domain.

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 single VCF instance with dedicated Workload Domains per tenant strikes the balance between operational efficiency and isolation. It reduces lifecycle tasks since only one management domain must be maintained, while each tenant having a dedicated workload domain ensures isolation of compute resources. This meets all three stated requirements effectively: lifecycle simplicity, minimal overhead, and tenant-specific compute separation.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Documentation explicitly defines the four key component areas provided by a VKS cluster:

“The components that run in a VKS cluster span four areas: Authentication and authorization, storage integration, pod networking, and load balancing.”

These components are implemented as follows:

Authentication webhook: validates user access tokens.

Container Storage Interface (CSI): integrates with VMware Cloud Native Storage (CNS).

Container Network Interface (CNI): provides pod-level networking (Antrea or Calico).

Cloud Provider Implementation: enables Kubernetes LoadBalancer service creation.

This holistic integration ensures secure, scalable, and production-grade operation of Kubernetes workloads within vSphere Supervisor.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture Guide — “VKS Cluster Components.” (pp. 5637–5639)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Workload Management Overview — “VKS Functional Architecture and Services.”

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.”