50 VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualization Design Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

During a design workshop, an application owner states the system must tolerate the failure of any single ESXi host without downtime and with minimal manual intervention. Which design approach best satisfies this requirement?

A customer wants to reduce the risk of datastore outages impacting multiple workloads. Which storage design decision most directly improves failure-domain isolation?

Security requires that vMotion traffic must not be routable to the corporate network and must be separated from management traffic. Which design best meets this requirement?

Operations requests the ability to quickly apply consistent configuration changes across many ESXi hosts (for example, NTP, syslog, and storage multipathing policy) with minimal drift. Which design element best supports this?

A new cluster will host a latency-sensitive workload that experiences performance issues during memory contention. The design goal is to reduce the probability of host swapping while maintaining reasonable consolidation ratios. Which design recommendation is most appropriate?

A design requires predictable performance for a set of database VMs while still allowing the cluster to balance other workloads automatically. Which DRS/cluster design best matches this requirement?

A customer needs east-west micro-segmentation so that only specific application tiers can communicate, regardless of IP addressing changes or VM mobility. Which design is most suitable?

A design must support routine patching with minimal service interruption and a clear rollback strategy. Which combination of operational features best supports this requirement for ESXi hosts?

A cluster is designed to survive a full rack failure. Hosts are evenly distributed across two racks. Network uplinks from each host connect redundantly to both Top-of-Rack switches, but the storage fabric is single-homed per rack. Which design change most directly addresses the stated availability requirement?

A regulated environment requires cryptographic separation between tenants. The network team proposes using VLANs only, while the security team requires enforcement that follows the workload even if it moves to a different host or port group. Which design best satisfies this requirement while minimizing dependence on physical network configuration?

A customer is creating a conceptual design and wants to ensure all requirements are measurable and testable before moving to the logical design. Which requirement statement is BEST written to be testable?

A design requires separating the management plane from the workload plane so that operational tooling remains available during tenant network changes. Which design choice BEST meets this goal?

A customer needs to ensure that if a single storage path fails, VMs remain running without manual intervention. Which design feature BEST addresses this requirement?

A customer plans to use vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) with image-based cluster management but also requires the ability to use a small set of legacy vendor utilities that depend on manual driver updates. What is the BEST design recommendation?

A cluster hosts latency-sensitive workloads. The customer reports occasional performance jitter during contention. They want a design adjustment that reduces CPU scheduling variability for specific VMs while keeping overall cluster flexibility. Which option is BEST?

A customer requires micro-segmentation where security policy follows the workload regardless of IP changes and VM mobility. They also want to minimize reliance on VLAN sprawl. Which approach BEST meets these design goals?

A customer wants to reduce the risk of management outages caused by an external dependency failure. The environment uses centralized identity services for vCenter authentication. Which design recommendation BEST improves availability while maintaining security?

During a design workshop, stakeholders disagree on whether an application requires fault tolerance at the VM level or if automated restart is sufficient. Which input BEST determines the correct availability mechanism?

A customer is designing a stretched environment across two sites. They require that a complete site failure does NOT cause split-brain behavior in the storage layer and that the remaining site continues to operate without manual intervention. Which design element is MOST critical to meet this requirement?

A security team mandates that east-west traffic between application tiers must be inspected and controlled even when the tiers are on the same host. They also require that a compromise of the physical network does not allow bypass of these controls. Which design satisfies these requirements BEST?

A customer is starting a new vSphere design engagement. Stakeholders disagree on whether the primary goal is cost reduction or maximum resiliency. Which document is MOST appropriate to establish the design direction before proposing architecture choices?

A design must support planned maintenance without downtime for a set of critical VMs. The customer requires that a single host failure must not violate availability targets. Which design choice BEST addresses this requirement?

A security team mandates that management plane traffic must not be reachable from workload networks. Which approach BEST meets this requirement in a vSphere design?

A customer runs two categories of workloads: latency-sensitive transactional VMs and batch VMs that can be throttled. They want the design to ensure predictable performance for transactional workloads during contention without requiring per-VM manual monitoring. Which design recommendation BEST fits?

A vSphere cluster uses a mix of 10GbE and 25GbE uplinks due to phased hardware refresh. The customer wants consistent network performance and deterministic failover behavior for VM traffic. Which design approach is MOST appropriate?

A customer wants to minimize operational risk when applying host patches. The design must ensure that hosts are remediated in a controlled order and that configuration drift is detected. Which combination BEST addresses this?

A customer uses vSphere clusters with strict separation between Dev and Prod. They want a centralized operational model but must prevent accidental cross-environment changes. Which design decision BEST supports this requirement?

A customer requires that only authorized hosts can access specific storage volumes, and the design must reduce the blast radius of misconfiguration. Which storage security design is MOST appropriate?

A regulated environment requires proof that administrative actions are attributable to individuals and that logs are retained even if a vCenter instance is unavailable. Which design BEST satisfies this?

A customer designs stretched compute across two sites with synchronous storage replication. They require automated failover for most workloads, but a subset of VMs must remain local to meet data sovereignty rules (they must not run in the other site). Which design approach BEST meets both requirements?

A customer is starting a greenfield vSphere design and wants to ensure stakeholders agree on what the platform must achieve and how success will be measured. Which document should the architect produce first to drive agreement and scope control?

A design includes multiple clusters with different availability needs. The customer asks how to justify the added cost of the higher-availability cluster. Which approach best supports a defensible design decision?

A customer requires that VM-to-VM east-west traffic between security zones be inspected and only explicitly permitted flows allowed. Which design best meets this requirement while maintaining distributed enforcement close to workloads?

A customer wants a standardized approach to protect all VMs with different recovery objectives per application tier. Some VMs require near-continuous replication, while others only require daily backups. Which design best satisfies these mixed requirements?

An architect is designing a vSphere cluster for a workload that uses many small random writes and is sensitive to latency. Which storage design consideration most directly helps validate that the proposed solution will meet the workload needs?

A customer must ensure that management-plane traffic (vCenter, host management, and authentication) is isolated from tenant workload traffic. They also want to minimize the blast radius of misconfiguration. Which design choice best meets this requirement?

A cluster uses a single physical switch stack for all host uplinks. The customer requires higher availability for virtual networking without redesigning the entire campus network. Which host networking design most effectively increases resilience against a single switch failure?

Operations wants to reduce time-to-resolution and enforce consistent troubleshooting steps for common virtualization incidents (e.g., VM performance complaints, storage latency, failed migrations). What design deliverable best addresses this requirement?

A customer requires that administrative access to ESXi hosts and vCenter be tightly controlled with least privilege and centralized identity. They also require that access changes be auditable and quickly reversible. Which design best aligns with these requirements?

A financial services customer needs to prove that workloads from different regulatory domains cannot communicate unless explicitly allowed, and that policy enforcement remains effective even during vMotion events. Which design approach best satisfies this requirement?

A design requires minimizing the administrative effort of adding new ESXi hosts while ensuring all hosts consistently receive the same vSwitch, port group, and uplink configuration. Which approach best meets this requirement?

An application owner requires guaranteed low-latency for a VM that is sensitive to CPU scheduling delays. The cluster is otherwise moderately utilized. Which design choice most directly reduces CPU scheduling latency for that VM?

A security team requires separation of duties so that VM administrators cannot modify virtual networking policies, while network administrators can manage port groups and security settings. Which design best supports this requirement?

During a design review, a customer states: “Our primary goal is to reduce RPO for critical VMs to near-zero, but we also need the simplest operational model possible.” Which requirement should you clarify first to validate feasibility?

A cluster hosts mixed workloads. The design must prevent backup traffic from saturating uplinks used by vMotion and storage traffic on the same vSphere Distributed Switch. Which feature is most appropriate to meet this requirement?

A design uses multiple storage arrays with different performance characteristics. The customer wants VMs to automatically use appropriate datastores based on capacity and performance needs, and to maintain balance over time with minimal manual intervention. Which approach best meets these goals?

A customer requires that administrative actions be traceable to individuals for compliance. They also want to ensure that if one identity source becomes unavailable, administrators can still authenticate to vCenter. Which design recommendation best addresses both requirements?

A cluster design includes a mix of hosts with different CPU generations. The customer requires the ability to vMotion VMs freely between all hosts while also wanting to maximize performance when running on newer CPUs. Which design approach is most appropriate?

A security architecture requires micro-segmentation for east-west traffic between VMs on the same VLAN. The solution must not rely on changes to physical switch ACLs and should scale with dynamic VM mobility. Which design best meets these constraints?

A mission-critical cluster must tolerate the failure of an entire rack that contains multiple ESXi hosts and the top-of-rack switch. The customer also requires planned maintenance with minimal risk of violating availability objectives. Which design is most appropriate?