VMware Certified Specialist - vSAN Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A 6-node all-flash vSAN cluster supports a latency-sensitive database workload. The workload uses a VM Storage Policy with FTT=1 (RAID-1), stripe width=1. During a planned host maintenance, an administrator places one host into Maintenance Mode using "Ensure accessibility" and immediately observes a spike in read latency for the database VMs, even though no components are reported absent. Which architectural behavior best explains the latency increase?

An administrator is designing a stretched cluster for a mission-critical workload requiring site failure tolerance and local read performance. The requirements are: (1) tolerate full site failure, (2) maintain local reads at each site when healthy, (3) minimize inter-site traffic during normal operations. Which configuration best meets these requirements?

A vSAN ESA (Express Storage Architecture) cluster is being planned for mixed workloads. The storage team wants to ensure consistent performance under bursts and to avoid unexpected capacity exhaustion due to policy choices. Which statement best reflects a correct architectural consideration specific to ESA when choosing resilience policies?

A cluster has 8 hosts with a mix of storage device types. The administrator needs to introduce a new disk group design to improve performance consistency and reduce failure blast radius, but cannot afford extended unavailability. Which approach best aligns with vSAN best practices while minimizing risk during the transition?

An administrator wants to enable vSAN data-at-rest encryption in an existing production cluster with strict uptime requirements. The environment uses a KMS with occasional network instability. Which deployment decision best reduces risk of widespread VM disruption while still meeting the encryption requirement?

A customer runs a 4-node cluster and wants to change a large set of VMs from FTT=1 RAID-1 to FTT=1 RAID-5 to save capacity. They also require that at no point should the environment risk non-compliance due to insufficient resources during the transition. Which prerequisite is most critical to validate before applying the new policy at scale?

After a host failure and replacement, a vSAN cluster shows multiple objects stuck in "Absent" state for an extended period, and compliance is not restored automatically. The cluster has adequate free capacity and no network alarms. Which operational setting most directly controls how long vSAN waits before initiating rebuild of absent components, and what action is most appropriate?

A cluster experiences recurring vSAN performance degradation during business hours. vCenter shows heavy resync activity even though no failures are reported. The administrator recently enabled a policy change on a VM folder and also scheduled weekly host patching with Maintenance Mode. Which combined operational practice is most likely causing repeated resync storms, and what is the best mitigation?

In a 2-site stretched cluster, a transient inter-site network issue causes a partition where both sites remain up but cannot communicate. Shortly after, VMs in Site B lose access to their vSAN datastore, while Site A continues running normally. There is a witness in a third location with stable connectivity to both sites. What is the most accurate explanation of the observed behavior?

A vSAN cluster reports intermittent I/O errors for a subset of VMs. Skyline Health shows sporadic "Congestion" and "Network partition" warnings, but only during peak backup windows. The backup proxies are on a separate VLAN and use NFS to a backup target. vSAN traffic is on a dedicated VLAN but shares the same physical uplinks. What is the most effective next troubleshooting step to validate the likely root cause?