50 VMware Certified Advanced Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Automation Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An organization is designing an automation approach for provisioning VCF workload domains. They want a repeatable workflow that enforces naming standards, network selection, and cluster sizing before any resources are created. Which design approach best supports this requirement?

A developer is automating VCF tasks and needs an authentication method that avoids embedding usernames and passwords in scripts. Which approach is the best practice for securing automation access to VCF components?

A team is building an orchestration workflow that creates a workload domain and then configures additional services. They need to ensure that downstream tasks run only after the domain creation is fully completed. What is the most reliable workflow strategy?

An automation pipeline intermittently fails when calling VCF APIs. The failures correlate with temporary network latency and API timeouts. What is the recommended first remediation in the automation code?

A platform team wants a single, standardized automation pipeline to provision multiple workload domains with different network pools and storage policies per environment (dev/test/prod). Which approach best balances reusability and control?

An engineer is automating host commissioning into VCF and wants to reduce failures caused by inconsistent host state. Which pre-check is MOST important to include before attempting to add hosts to the SDDC Manager inventory?

A workflow provisions a workload domain and then applies additional configuration steps. If a mid-workflow step fails, the team wants the environment to return to a known good state automatically. Which orchestration pattern best addresses this requirement?

After integrating an automation tool with VCF, API calls succeed from one automation runner but fail from another with certificate errors. Both runners use the same code and credentials. What is the MOST likely cause?

A company wants to implement GitOps-style automation for VCF so that workload domain configuration is driven from a desired state definition. They also want to minimize the risk of accidental destructive changes when a configuration file is modified. Which design is MOST appropriate?

An automation workflow calls multiple VCF APIs. The create operation is retried after a timeout, and the workflow occasionally ends up with duplicate resources or conflicting tasks. What is the BEST way to prevent this outcome?

An organization wants to standardize automated deployments across multiple VCF workload domains while allowing each domain to apply its own naming convention and network segment selection. Which design approach best supports reusability with domain-specific customization?

You need to trigger an automation workflow whenever a VM is provisioned through a self-service request, and you must capture request metadata (requestor, lease, project) to drive post-provisioning actions. What is the most appropriate integration point?

A workflow fails intermittently when calling a REST endpoint due to transient network issues. Which change is the best practice to improve reliability without masking persistent failures?

Your team is building an automation pipeline that provisions VMs and then configures the guest OS. Some tasks must run even if later steps fail (e.g., releasing IP reservations). Which workflow pattern is most appropriate?

A company wants to automate the creation of firewall rules in NSX as part of application deployment, but security requires strict separation of duties: developers can request rules only within predefined boundaries, while the security team owns the policy definitions. What is the best solution design?

After integrating an automation platform with vCenter and NSX, provisioning works but network customization fails with "permission denied" when creating logical segments. Which troubleshooting step is most likely to resolve the issue?

You are designing an automated deployment for multiple application tiers. Each tier must be deployed in order, but within a tier, multiple identical nodes can be deployed concurrently. What orchestration approach best fits this requirement?

A platform team wants to ensure that all automated deployments apply consistent tagging and ownership metadata so that chargeback and lifecycle policies work correctly. Where should this be enforced most effectively?

A workflow updates both NSX security policy and an IPAM system. If the NSX update succeeds but the IPAM update fails, the system must return to a consistent state. Which approach best addresses this requirement in a distributed automation process?

Your organization uses Git-based CI/CD to manage automation artifacts. A new workflow version passed unit tests but failed in production due to missing environment-specific configuration (endpoints and credentials references). What is the best practice to prevent this class of failure?

An administrator wants a standard, repeatable way to trigger multiple automation actions (e.g., create a project, apply policies, and send notifications) whenever a new VCF workload domain is created. Which approach best aligns with orchestration best practices?

A team is building a cloud template that provisions a VM, then configures the OS via a configuration management tool. They want the configuration step to run only after the VM is successfully deployed and has network connectivity. What is the most appropriate design pattern?

Users report that a self-service deployment intermittently fails with a message indicating a name conflict for a network tag that should be unique per project. What is the best immediate troubleshooting step to identify the source of the conflict?

A platform team needs to automate creation of multiple similar projects with consistent entitlements, lease policies, and naming standards. They want changes to be tracked, reviewed, and promoted across environments. Which approach best meets these requirements?

An organization wants to ensure that all deployed VMs automatically receive specific security tags and backup tags, and that users cannot remove them. Where should this control be implemented for the best balance of governance and automation?

A workflow provisions resources in multiple systems (cloud, IPAM, DNS). Failures sometimes occur after IP allocation but before DNS creation, leaving orphaned allocations. What is the recommended workflow design to prevent resource leakage?

A deployment uses an extensibility action that calls an external REST endpoint. The action works in test but fails in production with a TLS handshake error. Both environments can resolve the hostname. What is the most likely cause?

A company must automate provisioning in a regulated environment. They require that every deployment is traceable to an approved change record and that the automation platform cannot deploy unless that record is validated. Which design best satisfies this requirement?

A team is building reusable workflows for multiple tenants. They need to safely pass credentials to external systems without hardcoding secrets in workflow scripts or inputs. Which approach is most appropriate?

After migrating to a new automation endpoint, day-2 actions (e.g., power operations) work, but day-0 provisioning fails when selecting networks. The cloud account tests successfully. Which issue is the most plausible root cause?

An organization is building an automation pipeline for provisioning new workload domains in VMware Cloud Foundation. They want a standardized, reusable definition that supports parameterization and can be promoted between environments with minimal drift. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

A developer is authoring an orchestration workflow to request a network segment and then deploy a VM. The workflow must stop immediately if segment creation fails to avoid orphaned compute resources. What is the BEST workflow control behavior to implement?

A team is troubleshooting intermittent automation failures when calling platform APIs. Failures correlate with short network outages between the automation engine and the management domain. Which change is MOST likely to improve resilience without masking persistent errors?

You need to grant an automation service account the minimum permissions required to deploy VMs into approved projects while preventing it from modifying platform-wide configuration. Which principle should guide the permission design?

An automation pipeline provisions multiple components (network, storage policy assignment, VM, and post-config scripts). If the post-config scripts fail, the environment must be reverted to the pre-request state. Which workflow pattern BEST meets this requirement?

A company wants every automated VM deployment to include standardized tags and naming conventions for cost allocation and ownership tracking. They also want to prevent deployments that do not meet the standard. What is the BEST approach?

An automation workflow retrieves an access token from an identity provider and then calls multiple management APIs. The workflow occasionally fails mid-run due to token expiration. What is the MOST effective fix?

A platform team is designing automation that must deploy workloads to the correct cluster based on compliance requirements (for example, data sovereignty or regulated environments). Which design choice BEST supports this outcome?

A workflow provisions an NSX networking object and then immediately updates it with additional settings. Intermittently, the update call fails because the object is not yet fully realized. What is the BEST way to address this in the workflow?

A security review finds that automation logs may include credentials and sensitive payload data when API calls fail. The team needs to preserve troubleshooting value while reducing exposure. What is the MOST appropriate remediation?

An automation engineer is designing a VCF automation approach for multiple teams. The requirement is that application teams can request infrastructure through self-service, while the platform team enforces network, storage, and naming standards consistently across all deployments. Which design approach best meets this requirement?

A workflow that provisions a new environment in VCF must call multiple APIs. If any step fails, the workflow must automatically undo previous changes to avoid orphaned resources. Which workflow pattern should be used?

A team is troubleshooting intermittent failures in an automation pipeline that creates NSX segments and then attaches them to newly provisioned workloads. The segment creation API returns success, but the next step fails because the segment is not yet usable. What is the best fix in the workflow design?

An automation developer needs to store secrets used by workflows (API tokens and passwords). The requirement is to prevent secrets from being hard-coded or exposed in logs, and to support rotation without changing workflow code. What is the recommended approach?

A platform team wants to prevent duplicate environment builds when users submit the same request multiple times due to UI timeouts. The workflow must be safe to re-run without creating additional resources. Which implementation principle best addresses this?

A company is standardizing how workflows are promoted from development to production. They require traceability of who approved changes, the ability to roll back, and repeatable deployments of workflow packages. Which approach best meets these requirements?

A workflow integrates with several external services and must emit operational telemetry so that failures can be correlated across systems. What is the most effective logging/telemetry strategy?

An automation workflow provisions compute, networking, and storage. The platform team wants faster execution but must avoid API throttling and ensure dependent tasks run in the correct order. Which orchestration approach is most appropriate?

A team is automating workload domain expansion. The workflow sometimes fails halfway through due to a transient upstream API error. The requirement is: (1) the workflow must resume from the last successful step, (2) it must not repeat side-effecting operations, and (3) it must support manual intervention before resuming. Which design best meets these requirements?

After implementing automation for VCF lifecycle operations, the operations team reports that periodic certificate rotations cause automation failures because API clients reject endpoints intermittently. The team needs a robust, secure solution that minimizes outages and avoids bypassing TLS validation. What should be implemented?