VMware Certified Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Administrator Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An organization is designing a multi-workload-domain VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. The platform team wants strict separation between the Management Domain and all VI Workload Domains, while still allowing centralized backup, monitoring, and identity services to reach all domains. They also want to minimize blast radius if a VI domain’s NSX configuration is changed incorrectly. Which architecture decision best satisfies these requirements?

A VCF deployment must meet a security requirement: administrators must be able to manage ESXi hosts without exposing host management interfaces to the corporate network, and access must be audited and controlled centrally. Which approach aligns best with VCF operational best practices to meet this requirement?

During a bring-up, Cloud Builder fails validation for the management network because the ESXi hosts cannot reach the NTP servers, yet DNS and gateway pings succeed. The NTP servers are reachable from other VLANs. A network team states that UDP/123 is filtered between the management VLAN and the NTP subnet. What is the most appropriate next step to proceed with a compliant VCF deployment without weakening time-sync integrity?

You are commissioning additional hosts into an existing VI Workload Domain using SDDC Manager. The hardware is on the VMware Compatibility Guide and the ESXi image matches the domain image baseline. Commissioning repeatedly fails at the host network validation step. Investigation shows the top-of-rack switch ports are configured as access ports, but the design requires multiple tagged VLANs on those uplinks for vMotion, vSAN, and overlay/transport. What is the best corrective action that aligns with VCF validated deployment patterns?

A company is deploying a VI Workload Domain that must support both Kubernetes workloads (requiring NSX overlay) and high-throughput VM workloads that should avoid overlay encapsulation when possible. They want a design that maintains VCF manageability while allowing both networking models. Which approach best fits?

After applying an SDDC Manager-driven lifecycle upgrade, multiple clusters in a VI Workload Domain show compliance drift: the ESXi hosts report the correct image, but vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) health checks show inconsistent MTU and VLAN settings on certain uplinks. Operations reports that someone applied manual changes directly in vCenter to “fix” a connectivity issue. What is the best remediation approach to restore VCF desired state and prevent recurrence?

A tenant reports intermittent application timeouts after a capacity expansion. vSAN Health is green, but performance graphs show spikes in latency aligned with resync activity and high network utilization. The environment uses vSAN over a shared 25GbE fabric with other traffic types. Which operational change is most likely to reduce the latency spikes while aligning with best practices?

An operations team needs to delegate day-2 tasks for a specific VI Workload Domain to an application platform team, but they must not be able to modify the Management Domain, create new workload domains, or change global lifecycle settings. They also require auditing and least-privilege access. Which approach best meets the requirement in a VCF environment?

A VI Workload Domain’s NSX transport node preparation succeeds for ESXi hosts, but TEP connectivity is partially broken: hosts in one rack can reach each other, but cannot reach hosts in another rack. VLAN-backed management connectivity is fine across racks. The network team confirms that the underlay is routed and that jumbo frames are enabled on some, but not all, inter-rack links. What is the most likely root cause and best next troubleshooting step?

SDDC Manager prechecks for a domain update fail with an error indicating it cannot establish trust to vCenter/NSX endpoints due to certificate validation. The environment recently replaced certificates on vCenter and NSX using a corporate CA. Workload operations are mostly functional, but SDDC Manager cannot proceed with lifecycle tasks. What is the best corrective action to restore lifecycle manageability while maintaining secure certificate practices?