VMware Certified Professional - VMware vSphere Foundation 5.2 Administrator Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An administrator notices that after enabling vSphere DRS in a cluster with heterogeneous CPU architectures (Intel and AMD hosts), some VMs cannot migrate between specific hosts even though vMotion is properly configured. The cluster has EVC enabled at Intel Merom level. What is the MOST likely root cause and appropriate solution?

During a maintenance window, an administrator attempts to place an ESXi host into maintenance mode, but the operation fails with the error 'Cannot evacuate VM because it is involved in a HA restart operation.' vSphere HA is configured with VM restart priority set to Medium for all VMs. The host shows as 'Connected' and no VMs are currently powered off. What is the BEST troubleshooting approach?

A vSphere administrator configures a distributed switch with NIOC (Network I/O Control) enabled and sets shares for different traffic types. Despite configuring Management Traffic with High shares (100) and vMotion with Low shares (25), vMotion operations are not being throttled during periods of network congestion. What is the MOST likely cause?

An organization has a vSphere cluster with admission control set to 'Percentage of Cluster Resources Reserved' at 25% for both CPU and memory. The cluster contains 4 hosts with 32GB RAM each (128GB total). A new 48GB VM needs to be powered on, but the operation fails with an insufficient resources error even though current memory usage shows only 60GB consumed. What explains this behavior?

An administrator configures a VM with a 100GB thick-provisioned eager-zeroed disk on a VMFS6 datastore and sets a memory reservation equal to the VM's configured memory (16GB). After several months, the administrator attempts to take a snapshot but receives an error stating insufficient disk space, despite the datastore showing 200GB free. What is the MOST likely cause?

A vSphere administrator notices that VMs on a particular host are experiencing storage latency (30ms average read latency) despite the storage array reporting normal performance (<5ms). The host has 4 HBAs configured with PSP (Path Selection Policy) set to Round Robin (RR) with IOPS=1000. ESXi version is current and storage queues show no throttling. What advanced troubleshooting step should be performed FIRST?

A company implements vSphere DRS with VM-Host affinity rules to keep database VMs on hosts with local SSD cache. They also configure VM-VM anti-affinity rules to separate database primary and replica VMs. During a host failure, vSphere HA successfully restarts VMs but places both primary and replica database VMs on the same host, violating the anti-affinity rule. What configuration change would BEST prevent this scenario?

An administrator configures resource pools in a vSphere cluster with the following hierarchy: Production (10000 MHz reservation, 100 shares-High) and Development (5000 MHz reservation, 50 shares-Normal). A critical Production VM with 8000 MHz reservation is failing to power on with error 'Insufficient CPU resources.' The cluster has 4 hosts with 2.5GHz 8-core CPUs (80GHz total, 64GHz available after overhead). Current CPU usage is 40GHz. What is the issue?

A security-focused organization requires all vSphere management traffic to use certificate-based authentication and encrypted channels. After implementing ESXi host certificates signed by a corporate CA and replacing vCenter Server certificates, administrators can connect to vCenter but cannot add new hosts to vCenter. The error indicates 'SSL verification failed.' What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

An administrator configures a stretched vSphere cluster across two sites (Site A and Site B) with a witness host at Site C for vSphere HA. After a network partition that isolates Site B from Sites A and C (but witness remains accessible to Site A), VMs at Site B unexpectedly power off. Site B hosts can still access their local storage. What configuration would have prevented this outcome?