VMware Certified Professional - VMware vSphere Foundation Support Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An organization is designing a vSphere Foundation management cluster that must remain operational during a host failure and still support VM lifecycle operations (e.g., vMotion, HA/DRS decisions). They want to minimize dependencies on external services while keeping the design aligned with best practices for resiliency. Which architecture decision best meets these requirements?

After replacing a top-of-rack switch, multiple ESXi hosts begin logging intermittent 'lost network connectivity' events for the Management Network, but VM traffic on a separate VLAN remains stable. vCenter shows frequent host disconnects/reconnects. The switch team confirms LACP is enabled on the uplink port-channel. The ESXi hosts use vSphere Distributed Switch with two uplinks in an LACP LAG. What is the MOST likely root cause?

A VM experiences sporadic application timeouts. The guest OS shows disk latency spikes up to several seconds. In vSphere performance charts, the datastore latency (DAVG) remains low, but the VM's kernel latency (KAVG) spikes while GAVG also spikes. CPU Ready is low and network is normal. What is the MOST likely cause at the VM layer?

A vSphere admin enables a new VM encryption policy for a set of VMs. Shortly after, one encrypted VM fails to power on with an error indicating it cannot access required encryption keys. Other encrypted VMs on the same cluster continue running normally. Which action is the BEST next step to isolate the issue?

A cluster is configured with vSphere HA and DRS. After a host failure, several VMs do not restart due to 'insufficient resources' even though the cluster appears to have enough total capacity. The admin notices many VMs have reservations, and HA Admission Control is enabled. Which change MOST directly increases successful restarts while preserving predictable performance for critical workloads?

A VM running a latency-sensitive database must be migrated to a new cluster. The target cluster uses a different vDS port group configuration and the VM must keep the same IP without changing the guest configuration. The network team confirms L2 adjacency between the source and target VLANs does NOT exist. What is the BEST approach to migrate the VM with minimal downtime while meeting the IP constraint?

An ESXi host reports intermittent APD/PDL events for a shared VMFS datastore used by many VMs. Only one host in the cluster is affected; other hosts see the datastore as healthy. The affected host uses two storage paths through separate fabrics. Which is the BEST next troubleshooting step to narrow the fault domain?

A VM is configured with snapshots and the datastore is nearing capacity. The admin consolidates snapshots, but consolidation fails and the VM briefly pauses during retries. The event log indicates insufficient space for snapshot consolidation. What is the BEST corrective action that minimizes risk of data loss and restores normal operation?

A cluster uses vSphere Distributed Switch. After a maintenance change, only VMs connected to one specific distributed port group lose connectivity; management vmkernel and other port groups remain unaffected. The physical uplinks show 'up'. The issue occurs across multiple hosts. Which configuration issue is MOST likely?

During troubleshooting of random VM reboots, an admin observes that vMotion succeeds but the VM occasionally resets shortly after DRS migrates it to another host. Logs show a machine check exception (MCE) and the host enters a degraded hardware state. Other VMs on that destination host show corrected hardware errors but keep running. Which action is MOST appropriate to stabilize the environment?