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

An administrator is asked to explain the primary role of SDDC Manager in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment. Which statement best describes it?

A workload domain in VCF is experiencing intermittent storage latency. You want a single place to correlate vSAN performance metrics with vSphere and NSX signals to speed up triage. Which approach is most appropriate?

An operator must patch the VCF software stack and wants to follow best practices to minimize risk and ensure component compatibility. What should be done first?

After a network maintenance window, several VCF services show as unhealthy in the management domain, but the ESXi hosts and vCenter appear reachable. Which action is the most appropriate first step?

A team wants to add capacity to an existing workload domain. They need the new hosts to be added in a supported manner that maintains consistent configuration and lifecycle management. What is the recommended approach?

A workload domain shows periodic CPU ready spikes and increased VM latency. The cluster has adequate aggregate CPU capacity. Which metric combination best indicates the issue is likely due to contention from overly aggressive vCPU sizing rather than a host hardware fault?

An organization requires strict separation between the infrastructure components and tenant workloads, while still allowing multiple application environments to be managed under the same VCF instance. Which design choice best meets this requirement?

An operator runs a lifecycle precheck for a workload domain upgrade and it fails due to a reported "drift" in host configuration. What is the best next step to remediate while keeping the environment in a supported state?

During an NSX-backed workload domain expansion, the operation fails after host addition with an error indicating that transport node preparation did not complete. Host connectivity to vCenter is healthy. Which troubleshooting sequence is most appropriate?

Your organization requires a repeatable, low-risk process to apply VCF updates while ensuring a fast recovery if a critical issue is detected mid-change. Which operational plan is most aligned with VCF best practices?

An administrator needs to determine which component in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is responsible for automating host imaging and applying the desired ESXi software specification across a workload domain. Which component provides this capability?

A workload domain shows intermittent application latency. The administrator wants to quickly validate whether the issue correlates with storage latency at the cluster level. Which metric is the MOST appropriate first check in vSphere performance charts?

An administrator is asked to explain the primary purpose of the VCF Management Domain in a standard architecture. Which statement BEST describes it?

A VCF operations team wants a consistent way to detect and alert on configuration drift across multiple workload domains (for example, NTP/DNS misconfiguration, vSphere cluster settings variance) and track compliance over time. Which approach best fits this requirement?

During a planned maintenance window, an administrator initiates a workload domain update from SDDC Manager. The precheck fails due to a host not being compliant with the desired image. What is the BEST next action to maintain VCF supportability and complete the update safely?

A cluster in a workload domain experiences periodic spikes in CPU Ready time on multiple VMs, while host CPU usage remains moderate. Which action is MOST likely to reduce CPU Ready time without adding new hardware?

After deploying a new workload domain, several ESXi hosts display 'Not Responding' intermittently in vCenter, but management VM connectivity is stable. Log review suggests missed heartbeats. Which is the MOST likely underlying issue to investigate first?

An operations team needs to provide self-service VM provisioning for an application team while enforcing standardized naming, network selection, and lease/expiration policies in a VCF environment. Which solution is MOST appropriate?

A VCF administrator is troubleshooting an NSX-T overlay issue: new VMs cannot communicate across hosts, but VMs on the same host can communicate. The transport nodes appear up, and the VLAN-backed management network is healthy. Which check is MOST likely to identify the root cause?

An enterprise must meet a strict change-control policy requiring a roll-back plan for failed infrastructure updates. While updating a workload domain through SDDC Manager, a vCenter Server update step fails after the appliance is already upgraded. What is the BEST next step to restore service with minimal risk and align to VCF operational practices?

An operations engineer needs to identify which component in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment is responsible for orchestrating end-to-end workload domain lifecycle operations such as create, expand, and patch. Which component provides this orchestration?

A capacity dashboard shows a cluster in a workload domain is approaching a memory threshold. The operations team wants proactive alerting before contention occurs, aligned to VCF operational best practices. Which approach is most appropriate?

During routine operations, an administrator must apply vendor firmware updates while minimizing risk to the VMware Cloud Foundation environment. What is the recommended operational approach?

After expanding a workload domain with new hosts, the cluster shows uneven storage utilization and some VMs experience higher latency. vSAN is enabled. Which action is most appropriate to restore balanced storage utilization over time?

A new application requires micro-segmentation, distributed firewalling, and consistent policy enforcement across multiple clusters in a workload domain. Which VCF-aligned solution is the best fit?

A lifecycle update attempt fails during prechecks with an error indicating the environment is in a 'drifted' state. What is the most appropriate next step to proceed safely?

An operations team wants to reduce mean time to identify (MTTI) by correlating alarms from vCenter, vSAN, and NSX into a single view and then driving standardized remediation runbooks. Which approach best meets this goal in a VCF operations context?

After a planned change, multiple NSX segments in a workload domain lose connectivity. The physical underlay is confirmed healthy, but VMs cannot reach their default gateway. The NSX Edge nodes show high CPU but are up. Which is the most likely cause to investigate first?

A VCF environment uses a dedicated management domain. The design team asks why management components should not be deployed in the same workload domain as business workloads. Which rationale best supports the dedicated management domain design?

During a VCF lifecycle update, remediation repeatedly fails on a subset of hosts with errors indicating they cannot enter maintenance mode due to running workloads and policy constraints. What is the best operational resolution?

An operations engineer needs to confirm which component is responsible for creating and managing the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) management domain workload domain constructs (such as commissioning hosts and creating workload domains). Which component provides this functionality?

A VCF administrator wants a quick way to see overall platform health across management and workload domains from a single place, including alert rollups that can link into underlying vCenter/NSX issues. Which interface is the most appropriate starting point?

During routine operations, an engineer needs to add capacity by bringing new hosts into a VCF workload domain. What is the recommended approach to ensure the hosts are properly imaged and aligned with the VCF software stack before they are added?

A workload domain cluster shows intermittent VM latency complaints. The administrator wants to validate whether CPU contention is the primary issue using a metric that directly indicates CPU time a VM was ready but not scheduled. Which metric should be checked first?

A security team requires that all administrative access to ESXi hosts be centrally controlled, and they want consistent authentication across VCF components without maintaining local host accounts. What is the best practice approach?

After applying a VCF lifecycle update, a subset of ESXi hosts in a workload domain remains in a non-compliant state. The update history shows that remediation failed during a precheck for one host due to insufficient available space on its bootbank/storage used for images. What should the administrator do first to resolve the issue in a supported manner?

A VCF operator notices that alert volume increased significantly after onboarding a new workload domain. They want to reduce noise while ensuring critical platform issues are still visible, using a method that aligns with operations best practices. What should they do?

A workload domain uses NSX for networking. Several VMs report that east-west traffic between segments is failing, but north-south traffic to external networks still works. The administrator suspects an issue with distributed firewall policy enforcement. Where is the most appropriate place to verify whether traffic is being blocked by security policy?

A lifecycle operation in SDDC Manager fails while attempting to upgrade a component. The error indicates the component's certificate chain cannot be validated. The environment recently rotated certificates. What is the most likely root cause in a VCF-managed context?

A company plans to run multiple workload domains with strict administrative separation. They want to ensure operational tasks such as patching and upgrades remain centralized but day-to-day access to vSphere objects is limited per tenant/team. Which design best meets this requirement in VCF?

An operator is preparing to scale a workload domain by adding ESXi hosts. Which prerequisite is MOST important to verify to ensure the hosts can be commissioned successfully into VMware Cloud Foundation?

A VCF operations team wants a single place to monitor alerts and capacity trends across management and workload domains without logging into each vCenter individually. Which solution is the BEST fit?

An administrator needs to ensure that VCF upgrade workflows can run reliably by preventing time drift across the environment. What is the recommended approach?

A workload domain is experiencing intermittent application latency. Aria Operations shows CPU usage averages around 40%, but CPU Ready is consistently high for multiple VMs. What is the MOST likely cause?

During a planned patching cycle, an operator needs to minimize risk and keep VCF components within supported interoperability. Which approach is MOST appropriate?

An operator wants to allow different application teams to consume network segments independently while maintaining consistent security policy enforcement and simplified troubleshooting. Which design choice BEST supports this in a VCF workload domain using NSX?

After replacing a top-of-rack switch, multiple ESXi hosts in a workload domain show 'vSAN network partition' and 'vSAN health: multicast/MTU' warnings. VM traffic is normal. What is the FIRST operational check that is MOST likely to confirm the root cause?

An operations team wants to proactively detect when clusters are at risk of running out of capacity due to N+1 failures (host maintenance or unplanned host loss). Which metric or view is MOST appropriate to focus on in Aria Operations?

A VCF operator reports that SDDC Manager cannot complete a lifecycle operation because it fails prechecks related to certificate validation and component trust. The environment uses an enterprise CA and multiple intermediates. Which remediation is MOST appropriate?

A workload domain expansion is planned, but the new hosts are a different CPU generation than the existing cluster. The business requires vMotion compatibility between all hosts. What is the BEST operational approach to meet the requirement while preserving performance where possible?