2V0-13.25 Exam Dumps - VMware VCP-VCF Architect Questions and Answers

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Documentation explicitly defines the four key component areas provided by a VKS cluster:

“The components that run in a VKS cluster span four areas: Authentication and authorization, storage integration, pod networking, and load balancing.”

These components are implemented as follows:

Authentication webhook: validates user access tokens.

Container Storage Interface (CSI): integrates with VMware Cloud Native Storage (CNS).

Container Network Interface (CNI): provides pod-level networking (Antrea or Calico).

Cloud Provider Implementation: enables Kubernetes LoadBalancer service creation.

This holistic integration ensures secure, scalable, and production-grade operation of Kubernetes workloads within vSphere Supervisor.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture Guide — “VKS Cluster Components.” (pp. 5637–5639)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Workload Management Overview — “VKS Functional Architecture and Services.”

VCF networking guidance emphasizes independent uplinks and notes that while LACP is supported, it is not recommended and introduces additional operational considerations. Specifically: “Link aggregation to the host is supported but not recommended—the default switch-independent load-based teaming (LBT) provides benefits similar to those of LACP without added configuration complexity.” It further states: “Use of LACP… requires specific LACP configuration and switch setup… Not all vSphere features are supported with LACP… [and is] API only.” The design recommendation is: “Ensure each connection between the fabric switch and host operates as an independent uplink.”

Given the customer constraint that the VMware Administration team cannot re-configure the physical network, the prerequisite physical switch port-channel configuration for LACP cannot be performed. During bring-up and life-cycle operations, the Management Domain must follow VCF’s standardized, automated patterns and therefore cannot rely on fabric changes the team cannot make. As a result, LAG cannot be used in the Management Domain, and the design must adopt independent uplinks (LBT) for management, vMotion, and VM traffic while using NFS as principal storage per the NFS Storage Model.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

• VCF 9.0.1 Design – Network Link Aggregation: support, “not recommended,” API-only, and independent uplink recommendation.

• VCF 9.0.1 Design – Link Aggregation Design Recommendations (independent uplinks).

• VCF 9.0.1 Design – NFS Storage Model (principal NFS usage context).

The High Availability (HA) deployment model of VCF Operations ensures that both monitoring and alerting services are resilient to node failure. Deploying Collector nodes at remote sites enables local data collection, reducing WAN dependency and ensuring data is not lost during network interruptions.

This configuration aligns perfectly with the need to minimize monitoring and alerting downtime, which is critical in distributed, multi-instance environments.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide defines Manageability as the design quality that focuses on monitoring, configuration, reporting, and operational management capabilities. It states:

“Manageability encompasses the ability to monitor, configure, and control the solution effectively, ensuring operational insights and compliance with business objectives.”

The requirement to support 10,000 monitored objects and retain monitoring data for 24 months directly relates to the system’s ability to manage and retain operational metrics, not to its performance or availability. These parameters ensure long-term visibility, compliance, and data analytics consistency—core elements of Manageability.

In contrast:

Performance focuses on throughput and latency.

Availability ensures uptime and fault tolerance.

Recoverability deals with restoration after failure.

Therefore, the classification of these requirements falls under Manageability, as they directly define how the system manages and retains monitoring data.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Architecture Guide — “Design Qualities: Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability, and Security.” (pp. 72–74)

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design Framework — “Classification of Monitoring and Retention Requirements under Manageability.”

The overall private cloud SLA is 99.9%, but Platinum applications require 99.99%, which exceeds the infrastructure SLA. VMware design methodology states:

If an application’s SLA is higher than the infrastructure SLA, then the application itself must provide the additional resilience (e.g., clustering, active-active deployment, or application-level HA).

Options A and B reduce flexibility or impose unnecessary complexity.

Option D (Proactive HA) improves resiliency but cannot guarantee 99.99%, since Proactive HA still depends on underlying infrastructure SLA.

Therefore, the only valid recommendation is that Platinum workloads must implement resilience at the application layer.

According to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 documentation, when a stretched cluster is deployed across sites with sub-5ms latency and high-speed interconnects, vSAN can be configured for zero RPO (Recovery Point Objective), ensuring 100% data consistency and availability in the event of a site failure. vSAN supports co-locating management and application workloads and provides the shared storage functionality with automatic failover capabilities.

Additionally, vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) provide granular control of virtual machine storage, and when backed by a storage system that supports replication and failover across sites (with support for VASA 3.0 or later), vVols can meet the same requirements for data availability and disaster recovery.

To ensure zero RPO and high availability for the management domain, the best-fit design is to use a vSAN Stretched Cluster. With a 2ms latency and shared witness site, this design enables synchronous replication and automatic failover, ensuring no data loss (RPO 0) and minimal downtime.

For the workload domains where 24-hour RTO is acceptable, Live Recovery (leveraging replication and automation like Site Recovery Manager or Aria Automation Orchestrator) can be used to minimize operational effort and still meet recovery timelines. This strategy also aligns with minimizing hardware overhead by using the standby test infrastructure as failover capacity.

This statement expresses a financial limit — “Remaining budget” — constraining future expenditures on hardware. This is clearly a constraint, as it restricts the design options (e.g., can't procure new hardware). In the VMware Conceptual Model framework, constraints are factors that limit design choices without introducing risk or goal definitions.

Deploying two VCF Instances allows isolation between environments. One instance can serve as development/test and the other as production.

This separation enables patch/upgrade validation without impacting production. VCF architecture supports managing multiple VCF instances in a Fleet for centralized visibility and policy enforcement.

VMware explicitly recommends separating environments for lifecycle testing in environments with strict change control policies.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, in the section covering Istio Service Mesh integration, defines that objects and configurations in a service mesh are grouped and managed under Service and Cluster scopes.

“In an Istio Service Mesh deployment, objects are collected into groups to simplify policy management and routing. These groups can represent logical services or clusters to which policies apply, allowing consistent control across the environment.”

Service groups organize workloads that share a common application or microservice. They enable the consistent application of routing, observability, and security policies (e.g., mTLS, rate limiting).

Cluster groups define the boundary for multi-cluster management, enabling federated control and workload discovery across multiple Kubernetes clusters within the VMware Cloud Foundation ecosystem.

These group types allow centralized configuration, policy enforcement, and telemetry aggregation across workloads deployed in VCF-managed Kubernetes environments.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide — “Istio Service Mesh Architecture and Grouping Constructs.” (pp. 5798–5802).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 — “Service and Cluster Group Management in Multi-Cluster Istio Deployments.