50 VMware Certified Specialist - vSAN Practice Questions: Question Bank 2025

An administrator is designing a vSAN cluster and wants to minimize the risk of data unavailability if a single host fails. Which vSAN object policy setting directly defines how many host failures can be tolerated for data availability?

A vSAN cluster uses a two-tier architecture with disk groups. Which disk type is used for the cache tier in a hybrid vSAN configuration?

A vSAN administrator wants to ensure the cluster is configured to use the recommended network MTU and that the vSAN VMkernel interfaces can pass larger frames end-to-end. What is the BEST way to validate this without relying on third-party tools?

An administrator needs to expand a vSAN cluster by adding a new host and wants to avoid configuration drift. Which approach is the MOST appropriate best practice for consistently configuring storage and vSAN networking on the new host?

A stretched vSAN cluster is configured with two data sites and a witness site. A network issue causes inter-site connectivity between the two data sites to fail, but each data site can still reach the witness. Which behavior should the administrator expect?

A vSAN cluster shows repeated vSAN Health warnings about "unicast agent" communication failures between certain hosts. The vSAN VMkernel interfaces can ping each other, but only on a different VLAN. What is the MOST likely root cause?

An administrator enables vSAN compression to reduce capacity usage. After enabling it, some workloads experience increased latency. Which change is MOST likely to reduce the impact while maintaining space efficiency?

A vSAN cluster uses multiple disk groups per host. One capacity device in a disk group fails. What is the expected impact to the disk group and the objects that had components on that disk?

A 4-node all-flash vSAN cluster uses the default storage policy for critical VMs requiring FTT=1 with RAID-1 mirroring. One host enters maintenance mode with the option "No data migration" due to a planned short maintenance window. Afterward, the administrator sees reduced availability warnings for some objects. What is the MOST accurate explanation?

After a host replacement, an administrator adds the new host to an existing vSAN cluster. The host shows as a member of the cluster but contributes 0 capacity and the disks appear as "Ineligible" for vSAN. The disks are visible in ESXi and have existing partitions. What is the BEST next step to make the disks usable for vSAN while following best practices?

An administrator is designing a vSAN cluster and wants to ensure vSAN network traffic is isolated from other VMkernel services without adding additional physical NICs. Which configuration best meets this requirement?

A vSAN cluster shows that one host has vSAN enabled, but it has no disk group and contributes no capacity. The administrator wants the host to participate in storage. What is the NEXT action required?

Which vSAN feature primarily provides space efficiency by identifying duplicate data blocks and eliminating redundant copies before writing to capacity devices?

A 4-node vSAN cluster is configured with a vSAN storage policy requiring failures to tolerate (FTT)=1 using RAID-1. One host experiences a prolonged outage and vSAN begins rebuilding components to remain compliant. The administrator wants to reduce the chance of unnecessary rebuild traffic during short interruptions. Which setting should be adjusted?

After enabling a space-efficiency feature, an administrator observes increased CPU utilization across vSAN hosts and wants to confirm whether the feature could reasonably contribute to CPU load. Which feature is MOST associated with additional CPU overhead during normal operations?

A vSAN cluster is stretched across two sites with a witness host. Several VMs become inaccessible immediately after a site-to-site network partition, even though both sites still have power. Which misconfiguration is the MOST likely cause?

An administrator needs to validate that vSAN resynchronization traffic will not saturate the vSAN network during maintenance operations. Which built-in mechanism is BEST suited to control resync impact while allowing repairs to proceed?

A vSAN cluster intermittently reports 'Network partition detected' alarms, but only during peak hours. All hosts have redundant uplinks. Which action is the MOST appropriate first step to troubleshoot the root cause?

A customer wants a 3-node vSAN cluster design that can tolerate one host failure while also tolerating a full site/power-domain failure, with nodes distributed across two rooms (Room A: 2 hosts, Room B: 1 host). Which statement is TRUE regarding fault domains and policy behavior in this design?

During a planned host maintenance, an administrator selects 'Ensure accessibility' for a vSAN host with multiple components. After the host enters maintenance mode, some objects show reduced compliance until the host exits maintenance. Why does this occur?

An administrator wants to quickly validate whether vSAN disk-group membership is correct across all hosts in a cluster before putting the cluster into production. Which built-in capability is best suited to confirm the vSAN configuration consistency?

A vSAN cluster is configured with a dedicated VLAN for vSAN traffic. An administrator needs to ensure that vSAN traffic uses this network and not the management network. What is the correct configuration step?

A VM is associated with a storage policy that uses rules not supported by the target vSAN datastore (for example, the datastore does not provide the required data service). What is the expected result when attempting to apply the policy to the VM object?

A customer is designing a stretched cluster. They require the ability to survive a complete site failure while keeping data available with minimal operational complexity. Which configuration best meets this requirement?

After adding new capacity devices to several hosts, the administrator notices that new objects continue to be placed on older disk groups while the new devices remain lightly used. Which action is most appropriate to achieve a more even distribution while keeping objects available?

A vSAN cluster shows intermittent object accessibility issues. The vSAN Health check reports MTU mismatches on the vSAN VMkernel interfaces. The physical network is configured for jumbo frames. What is the most likely root cause?

An administrator needs to perform host maintenance on a vSAN cluster. The cluster has sufficient free capacity but must minimize resynchronization time when the host returns. Which maintenance mode option is most appropriate?

A vSAN cluster uses vSAN ESA and the customer wants to increase resilience while minimizing capacity overhead compared to mirroring. Which policy capability should be used to best meet this requirement?

A stretched vSAN cluster experiences a transient inter-site link issue. Both data sites remain up, but the witness is unreachable from Site A while reachable from Site B. Which outcome is most likely and why?

An administrator is troubleshooting high resynchronization times after host failures. vSAN Health shows the cluster is consistently operating near the resync bandwidth limit. What is the best action to reduce time-to-compliance without adding new hosts?

A vSAN administrator is reviewing object compliance and notices that a VM’s storage policy shows 'Noncompliant' due to insufficient fault domains. The cluster currently has 3 fault domains configured, but the policy requires tolerate 2 failures with RAID-1 mirroring. What is the most likely reason for the noncompliance?

An administrator wants to ensure that vSAN traffic is isolated and uses a dedicated network. Which configuration is a recommended approach?

A cluster uses a vSAN storage policy with 'Failures to tolerate (FTT)=1' and 'RAID-5/6 (Erasure Coding)' for a VM. The VM becomes noncompliant after being migrated to a smaller vSAN cluster. What is the most likely cause?

An administrator needs to place a host into maintenance mode for planned work. The vSAN cluster has sufficient free capacity, and the goal is to keep all VM objects compliant during maintenance. Which maintenance mode option should be selected?

After adding a new disk group, vSAN resynchronization traffic is saturating the inter-host links during business hours. The administrator wants to reduce impact while still allowing resync to proceed. What is the best action?

A vSAN administrator wants to verify that all hosts have consistent MTU settings for the vSAN VMkernel network to prevent fragmentation and intermittent performance issues. Which built-in tool should be used first?

A cluster experiences intermittent vSAN object accessibility issues after a top-of-rack switch replacement. All hosts are still reachable via management, but vSAN Health reports 'Multicast or Unicast Agent communication failures' depending on the configuration. What should the administrator validate first?

An administrator is designing a vSAN cluster and wants to maximize usable capacity while still maintaining the ability to recover from a single host failure. Which storage policy setting best meets this requirement?

A vSAN administrator needs to decommission a capacity disk that shows increasing error counts but is still online. The administrator wants to avoid unexpected object noncompliance during disk removal. What is the recommended approach?

A stretched vSAN cluster has an unexpected site partition. The witness is reachable from both sites, but the inter-site link is down. VMs remain running in only one data site, and the other site’s hosts show vSAN object access issues. What explains this behavior?

An administrator wants to verify whether a vSAN cluster is using unicast or multicast for vSAN network traffic. Where should this be checked?

A vSAN administrator needs to place one ESXi host into maintenance mode for a short hardware swap. The cluster has sufficient free capacity and the goal is to minimize resync time after the host returns. Which maintenance mode option should be selected?

An administrator wants to confirm that vSAN is enabled on a specific VMkernel adapter. Which configuration indicates the VMkernel adapter is used for vSAN traffic?

After adding hosts to an existing vSAN cluster, the vSAN Skyline Health shows a warning that the cluster is not using the recommended vSAN HCL firmware/driver combinations for some disk controllers. What is the recommended remediation approach?

A customer has a 2-node vSAN cluster with a witness host. One data node fails and VMs restart on the remaining node, but several objects show reduced availability and cannot satisfy the configured policy until the failed node returns. Which behavior best explains why the cluster continued to function with only one data node available?

A VM on vSAN shows poor read latency during business hours. vSAN Performance Service indicates high cache hit rate but elevated congestion on the vSAN network. Which change is the most appropriate first step to validate/improve the situation without changing the VM’s storage policy?

An administrator needs to ensure that a set of VMs always uses storage resources from a specific group of hosts within a stretched cluster (for example, licensing or workload separation reasons). Which vSAN feature is designed for this requirement?

A vSAN cluster uses encryption and the KMS becomes temporarily unavailable due to a network outage. The hosts are still running and VMs remain powered on. What is the most likely outcome during the outage?

After a network change, vSAN health reports intermittent 'vSAN: Cluster partition' events. The physical network team confirms there is no packet loss, but the ESXi hosts are connected through different switch stacks. Which design issue most commonly causes intermittent partitions in this scenario?

A customer wants to deploy a new vSAN cluster quickly and ensure consistent host configuration (including vSAN-related settings) across all hosts. Which approach is most aligned with VMware best practices for consistent deployment and lifecycle management?