VMware Telco Cloud NFV Skills Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A telco is designing a 3-site Telco Cloud platform (2 edge sites and 1 regional site). The VNFs require deterministic low-latency data plane at the edge, but centralized lifecycle management and consistent host configuration across all sites. The edge sites have limited on-site staff and intermittent WAN connectivity to the regional site. Which architecture choice best balances operational consistency with edge survivability? A. Deploy a single vCenter at the regional site managing all edge clusters directly, relying on DRS/HA for resilience B. Deploy independent vCenters per edge site with Enhanced Linked Mode across all three sites so each edge can operate autonomously when WAN is down C. Deploy a vCenter at each edge site and a separate “management vCenter” at the regional site; do not link them, but standardize via Host Profiles/Image-based lifecycle and centralized logging D. Deploy a single vCenter at one edge site and use stretched cluster across edge sites to avoid multiple management planes

A CSP is onboarding a latency-sensitive UPF workload. The data plane must use SR-IOV VF interfaces for throughput, but operations requires live migration for maintenance windows. During testing, vMotion fails for SR-IOV attached VMs. Which approach most appropriately meets both requirements with the fewest architectural compromises? A. Replace SR-IOV with VMXNET3 and use NSX accelerated networking features to recover equivalent throughput B. Use DPDK-based userspace networking with vSphere networking and reserve CPU cores, enabling vMotion while maintaining high throughput C. Keep SR-IOV and enable vSphere Fault Tolerance to avoid maintenance downtime instead of vMotion D. Keep SR-IOV and implement cold migration with planned maintenance; no change is needed because SR-IOV supports vMotion in all cases

A VNF onboarding team reports intermittent packet loss only when the VNF is deployed with multiple vNICs across two different port groups. ESXi hosts are dual-socket. The VNF vendor requires strict NUMA locality for both vCPU and vNIC queues. The platform currently uses automatic NUMA scheduling and no explicit CPU pinning. What is the most effective remediation to reduce packet loss while minimizing operational complexity? A. Increase vCPU count so the VM spans both NUMA nodes; this balances load and reduces queue contention B. Configure vNUMA/CPU reservations to keep vCPUs within a single NUMA node and align vNIC placement/queues to that NUMA node; avoid spanning NUMA C. Disable hyper-threading on all hosts and reduce vCPU count; this guarantees NUMA alignment automatically D. Enable DRS affinity rules to keep all VNFs on the same host; NUMA effects are caused by cross-host movement

A Telco Cloud cluster uses vSphere HA to protect control-plane VNFs. After a recent change, hosts intermittently enter a partitioned state and HA restarts some VMs even though the VMs are still reachable on the data network. The environment uses separate management and data networks, and the HA heartbeat is currently on the management network only. What is the best corrective action to avoid unnecessary HA failovers while maintaining proper failure detection? A. Disable HA and rely on application-level clustering; HA is not suitable for telco control-plane VNFs B. Add a second HA network heartbeat (or a dedicated heartbeat VLAN) and ensure consistent MTU/vSwitch configuration to reduce false partitions C. Increase the HA failure detection timeouts significantly so that transient issues never trigger restarts D. Move the HA heartbeat to the data network only, because it has higher bandwidth and is less congested

A CSP is migrating from a legacy VIM to VMware Telco Cloud Automation. They need to onboard CNFs with Day-0/Day-1 configuration, enforce consistent RBAC across tenants, and provide a repeatable approach for both VM-based VNFs and Kubernetes-based CNFs. Which onboarding design is most aligned with these requirements? A. Onboard everything as generic Helm charts and use Kubernetes RBAC only; manage VNFs manually in vSphere B. Use a single, monolithic blueprint per tenant that hardcodes all infrastructure settings to reduce variability C. Use modular blueprints with inputs/constraints for infrastructure, integrate with external IPAM/CMDB, and map tenant RBAC to projects; use appropriate package types for VNF and CNF while standardizing lifecycle workflows D. Avoid RBAC complexity by using one shared admin account for all tenants and isolate tenants only with VLANs

During a rolling maintenance window, a site experiences cascading alarms: CPU contention rises, packet drops increase, and several VNFs report missed keepalives. Post-incident analysis shows DRS moved multiple VNF VMs to rebalance CPU, but the moves caused NUMA misalignment and increased latency. What is the best operational control to prevent this class of incident while still allowing maintenance evacuations? A. Disable DRS entirely and perform all host maintenance with manual vMotion planning B. Use VM-Host affinity/anti-affinity plus DRS VM automation set to partially automated, with explicit host groups and maintenance-mode workflows that preserve NUMA-aware placement C. Increase DRS aggressiveness so it rebalances faster and reduces contention before VNFs detect it D. Enable Storage DRS to reduce CPU contention by distributing VMs across datastores

A tenant reports that only their CNF workloads cannot reach an external OSS endpoint over HTTPS, while other tenants can. The platform uses NSX for micro-segmentation. Troubleshooting shows DNS resolution works and TCP SYN leaves the pod, but no SYN-ACK returns. A packet capture on the Tier-1 gateway shows the flow is dropped due to a distributed firewall rule hit with an unexpected Applied To scope. What is the most likely configuration mistake? A. The rule was configured at the Tier-0 gateway instead of Tier-1, so it cannot apply to pods B. The policy used a group based on a dynamic tag, but the CNF nodes/pods do not carry the expected tags, causing the Applied To to default too broadly and match unintended traffic C. The rule is missing an explicit 'Any' service entry; without it, NSX drops return traffic by default D. HTTPS requires a load balancer VIP; direct egress from pods is not supported without NAT

A VNF requires strict separation of management, control, and data planes with different security postures. The current design uses a single vDS with multiple VLAN-backed port groups, and NSX micro-segmentation is enabled. An audit finds that a misconfigured trunk allowed a host to see VLANs that should not exist at that site. Which design change most effectively reduces the risk of VLAN sprawl while keeping operational flexibility? A. Replace VLAN-backed port groups with separate physical NICs per network and remove vDS B. Use NSX overlay segments for east-west isolation and minimize VLAN usage to routed uplinks only; enforce transport node uplink profiles and edge uplink policies consistently C. Keep VLANs but disable NSX; rely on physical firewalls between networks D. Implement PVLANs on the vDS; this eliminates the need for trunk validation

A regional Telco Cloud cluster hosts both control-plane VNFs (high availability) and batch analytics VMs (elastic). During a site power event simulation, the control-plane VNFs recovered, but service restoration time exceeded the SLO because the cluster lacked sufficient reserved capacity; analytics workloads consumed resources during restart. What is the best design to ensure predictable recovery capacity without permanently overprovisioning the entire cluster? A. Configure vSphere HA admission control with a dedicated resource pool and VM restart priorities so control-plane VNFs have guaranteed headroom and restart order B. Disable analytics workloads during maintenance windows only; no platform changes are required C. Increase overall cluster size to meet worst-case restart scenarios for all workloads concurrently D. Configure DRS to keep analytics VMs on the same host, leaving other hosts free for VNF restarts

A newly deployed VNF intermittently fails Day-1 configuration. The automation workflow reports success, but the VNF application logs show it received incomplete configuration files. Investigation reveals that customization scripts run before all secondary NICs are up and before routes to the config server are installed. Which remediation is most robust for NFV automation at scale? A. Add an arbitrary sleep delay to the workflow before running configuration steps B. Modify the guest customization/Day-1 process to be idempotent and event-driven (e.g., wait for specific NICs/routes/services), and implement retry logic with verification in the orchestrator C. Disable parallel provisioning so only one VNF is configured at a time, reducing race conditions D. Move the config server onto the same L2 segment as the management NIC so routes are never required