VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

An administrator is troubleshooting a VM that suddenly lost connectivity after a host failure in a vSphere HA cluster. The cluster has 8 hosts with distributed switches. After HA restarted the VM on another host, the VM cannot communicate on the network. The vDS shows healthy, but the VM's network adapter shows as connected in vCenter. The physical switches use LACP with the uplinks. What is the MOST likely cause?

A vSphere administrator is designing a resource allocation strategy for a cluster running mixed workloads including latency-sensitive database VMs and batch processing VMs. The cluster has 6 hosts with 384GB RAM each. Database VMs require consistent memory performance. During peak times, memory contention occurs. The administrator configures resource pools with shares (Database: 8000 High, Batch: 2000 Low). However, batch VMs still occasionally impact database performance. What additional configuration will BEST guarantee database VM memory performance?

An organization has a vSphere cluster with 10 ESXi hosts running 200 VMs. The storage team reports that a VMFS6 datastore is experiencing APD (All Paths Down) conditions intermittently for 30-90 seconds due to SAN fabric issues. Several VMs become unresponsive during these events. The administrator needs to configure the cluster to handle these transient storage failures gracefully. What combination of settings will provide the BEST protection?

A vCenter Server managing 500 VMs across multiple clusters is experiencing performance degradation. The vCenter database shows high CPU utilization and slow query response times. The administrator discovers that the vpxd service is consuming excessive resources during inventory collection cycles. Historical data retention is set to 1 year for all statistics levels. What is the MOST effective solution to improve vCenter performance without significantly impacting operational visibility?

An administrator is configuring a stretched vSphere cluster across two sites (SiteA and SiteB) with a witness host at a third location. The cluster runs business-critical VMs that must survive a complete site failure. Storage is replicated synchronously using vSAN stretched cluster. During testing, when SiteA is isolated, some VMs at SiteB fail to restart. vSphere HA is enabled with default settings. What is the MOST likely cause and solution?

A company runs a VM with a 2TB VMDK that performs large sequential write operations. The VM is on a VMFS6 datastore with 1MB block size. Performance monitoring shows high storage latency during write operations, but read performance is acceptable. The array is not showing high utilization. VAAI is confirmed functional. What should the administrator investigate FIRST to improve write performance?

An administrator manages a vSphere cluster with DRS enabled in fully automated mode. A three-tier application consists of web, application, and database VMs that must remain on separate hosts for licensing and performance reasons. VM-Host affinity rules are configured to keep each tier on specific hosts. During maintenance, the administrator places a host in maintenance mode, but DRS fails to evacuate certain VMs and the task remains at 0%. The VMs are powered on and healthy. What is the MOST likely cause?

A virtual machine is configured with 8 vCPUs and 32GB of memory. The VM frequently shows high CPU ready time (>10%) despite the ESXi host having 50% CPU idle capacity. The host has 2 physical CPUs with 12 cores each (24 total cores, 48 logical processors with hyperthreading). Six other VMs on the host have 4 vCPUs each. What is the MOST effective solution to reduce CPU ready time for the 8 vCPU VM?

An organization implements a vSphere distributed switch with multiple port groups for different security zones. The security team requires that VMs in the DMZ port group cannot communicate with VMs in the internal port group at Layer 2, even though both port groups exist on the same vDS. The administrator has already configured different VLANs for each port group (DMZ: VLAN 100, Internal: VLAN 200). However, a security audit reveals that MAC address table overflow attacks from the DMZ could potentially affect the internal network. What additional configuration provides the BEST security isolation?

A vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) deployment manages a large environment with 50 clusters and 800 hosts. The administrator notices that vCenter tasks are taking increasingly longer to complete, and the vSphere Client becomes unresponsive during peak hours. The vpxd-svcs service shows high memory consumption. Database queries are performing acceptably. What is the MOST likely cause and appropriate solution?