VMware 2V0-17.25 VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Administrator Exam Practice Test

The VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 NSX Projects and VPC Guide outlines the prerequisites for configuring external connectivity using a Transit Gateway (TGW). When VLAN-backed external connectivity is used, the documentation specifies:

“For VLAN-backed external connectivity, ensure that all hosts in the workload cluster where VPC workloads run have physical access to the VLAN(s) used by the Transit Gateway. This ensures end-to-end packet reachability between VPC segments and the physical router.”

Analysis of options:

A (TWO BGP Peers): BGP can be configured later to enable dynamic routing but is not a prerequisite for establishing VLAN-backed connectivity.

B (TNP attached): A Transport Node Profile is required for NSX host preparation, but it is part of the general NSX setup, not the specific prerequisite for TGW VLAN external connectivity.

C (Access to VLANs): This is the critical prerequisite—hosts running workloads must have access to the external VLANs. Without this, connectivity to the physical routers will fail.

D (Access to Edge TEP network): TEP networks are used for overlay traffic (Geneve encapsulation), not for VLAN-backed TGW external connectivity.

Therefore, the correct prerequisite is ensuring all VPC workload hosts have access to the VLAN(s) used by the Distributed TGW.

In NSX 4.x integrated with VCF 9.0,default segment security profiles block DHCP servers by default. TheNSX Admin Guidestates: “To allow DHCP servers on a segment, edit the applied segment security profile and set the DHCP Server Block option to NO.”

Cloning profiles (B, C) is an optional best practice but not required for functionality. The DHCP server block resides in thesecurity profile, not the IP discovery profile, making C and D incorrect. Therefore, the required step is toedit the default segment security profile, set DHCP Server Block = NO, and apply it.

TheVCF Healthfeature “provides a central location for monitoring the health of your environment,” including the ability to track “vCenter Server instances,” “ESXi hosts,” and “NSX deployments.” Health monitoring includes connectivity, configuration, and critical services status, surfacing alerts for remediation. The documentation’s scope statements make clear that VCF Health targets theinfrastructure components—vCenter, ESXi, and NSX—rather than the VCF Operations applications themselves (for example, Fleet Management or Logs). Therefore, the correct monitored components areESX hosts,vCenter Server, andNSX.

According to the VCF 9.0 Operations and Monitoring Guide:

Fleet Management: “VCF Operations Fleet Management enables cross-instance monitoring, unifying health and metrics across multiple VCF instances.”

Operations for Networks: “Provides application and network visibility, dependency mapping, and traffic analytics. Required to complete full-stack monitoring.”

Core VCF Operations is already deployed as part of the management stack and does not need to be added separately. Operations for Logs is optional for log aggregation, not mandatory for full-stack observability. The Management Pack Builder (C) is an add-on tool for custom packs, not a required component. Therefore, the correct two to add for full-stack monitoring are VCF Operations Fleet Management (A) and VCF Operations for Networks (E).

TheVCF 9.0 Deployment Guidenotes: “All ESXi hosts must be installed with a supported ESXi version using a VMware ISO before they are commissioned into SDDC Manager. Commissioning is always performed via the management domain vCenter.” The new workload domain vCenter does not exist until the domain is deployed, ruling out option A. The VCF Installer is used for initial bring-up, not workload domain expansion (E). Therefore, the two required steps are:install ESXi using a valid ISO (D)andcommission hosts via the management domain vCenter (B).

In Kubernetes RBAC,ClusterRoleBindingis the mechanism for granting permissions to resources that are not namespace-scoped. The documentation integrated into VCF 9.0 explains: “ClusterRoleBinding binds a user, group, or service account to a ClusterRole, granting cluster-wide permissions to non-namespaced resources such as nodes, storage classes, or persistent volumes.”

A RoleBinding grants access to namespace-scoped resources. RoleReference is a field within a RoleBinding/ClusterRoleBinding object, not a standalone object. ClusterRoleAccess is not a valid Kubernetes construct.

Thus, to assign permissions at a cluster-wide level, the correct object isClusterRoleBinding.

TheVCF 9.0 Upgrade Documentationclearly outlines a staged upgrade sequence: “The upgrade to VCF 9.0 begins with the SDDC Manager upgrade. Only after SDDC Manager is upgraded to 9.0 are the other component bundles (vCenter, ESXi, NSX, Operations) made available for download and application.”

This design ensures SDDC Manager is compatible with the lifecycle operations required for the rest of the environment. If SDDC Manager is not upgraded first, it cannot process or display other bundles. Offline repositories (A), proxy servers (B), or ASYNC tools (C) do not affect the bundle visibility order. Therefore, the correct answer isD. SDDC Manager must be upgraded first.

TheVCF 9.0 Service Mesh Integration Guidedefines Istio as: “Istio Service Mesh provides an infrastructure layer that transparently handles service-to-service communication, securing, observing, and controlling traffic between microservices.” The key purpose is enabling structured and observable communication between applications. While Istio includes discovery and load balancing, those are features, not the overarching purpose. A centralized routing table (Option D) is not the core definition. VMware documentation highlights Istio’s role inservice-to-service communication, observability, and policy enforcementwithin the service mesh. Therefore, the correct answer isB.

The vSAN ESA documentation in VCF 9.0 explains that auto-policy management dynamically selects the most efficient data placement policy based on cluster size. For RAID-6 (erasure coding with double parity), the minimum required host count is 6. The docs state:

“RAID-6 (Erasure Coding with FTT=2) requires a minimum of six hosts in a vSAN ESA cluster. This ensures that data and parity components can be distributed across unique failure domains.”

With fewer than six hosts, RAID-6 cannot be enforced and auto-policy management will fall back to RAID-1 mirroring. RAID-6 in vSAN ESA provides higher storage efficiency but comes with stricter host count requirements. Options 2 and 4 are far below requirements, while 8 provides more redundancy but is not the minimum. Therefore, the correct minimum number of hosts for RAID-6 with ESA is 6.

VCF 9.0 documents two Operations for Logs/Operations models—Simple (Standard)andHigh Availability (Cluster)—and highlight thatSimpleis the minimal footprint option intended for test/dev: “Architecture flexibility: Can be deployed in a Simple or Highly Available Cluster deployment. Recommended deployment is a HA Cluster… Simple deployment is for test/dev environments, it is not for production use cases.”

By contrast, HA/clustered models increase resources to provide redundancy at scale. Since the requirement is thesmallest resource footprint, theSimplemodel is the correct selection. (Stretched/Continuous Availability options are not listed VCF Operations models in this context.)

TheVCF Operations for Networks (formerly vRNI)enablesApplication Discovery and Network Visibility. According to VCF 9.0: “Operations for Networks provides flow-based application discovery, dependency mapping, and security planning. This allows administrators to visualize application topology and relationships across the VCF fleet.” By contrast, VCF Operations for Logs provides log aggregation, while the Collector provides integration for metrics, not discovery. The vSphere Supervisor enables Kubernetes workloads, not application discovery. Therefore, to achieveService and Application Discovery, administrators must deployVCF Operations for Networks.

TheVCF Automation Costing and Pricing Guideexplains:

“Define core costs for CPU, memory, and storage under Base Settings to apply fleet-wide.” (A)

“Mark the created policy as the default to ensure it applies globally.” (B)

For SAP HANA, “Create an exception policy under Base Settings with VM setup charges assigned to the SAP HANA cluster.” (E)Default Policy (C, F) is system-reserved. Sub-policies under “Resources” (D) are not valid. Correct configuration steps:A, B, E.

TheVCF 9.0 Operations Guide – Views and Reportsexplains the four types of views available for custom dashboards:

Object Relationship View:Displays dependencies and hierarchy between objects (for example, VMs, hosts, datastores) but does not provide exportable tabular data.

Scoreboard View:Provides a high-level KPI visualization of a few key objects but is not intended for large tabular exports.

List View (Correct):Displays tabular data across many objects, such as CPU, memory, and disk metrics for VMs. The guide states:“List views are useful when you want to compare metrics across multiple objects and can be exported to CSV for further analysis.”

Trend View:Focuses on historical data and growth over time, but export to CSV is not its primary purpose.

Because the security team requires bothtabular comparison of VM resource usageand the ability toexport the data to CSV, theList Viewis the only option that meets both requirements.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation:

The Istio integration in VCF 9.0 defines two main logical groupings for organizing workloads within a service mesh: Cluster groups and Service groups. The documentation notes: “Cluster groups allow you to organize and manage objects across different Kubernetes clusters. Service groups let you aggregate and manage services that share common policies, routing rules, or observability requirements.” .

These groups enable administrators to apply consistent service mesh policies across multiple deployments and clusters. They also simplify administration by centralizing traffic management, routing, and observability of workloads. Security, API, and Node are not Istio-specific grouping constructs but instead are other concepts used elsewhere (e.g., security policies, API endpoints, node objects in Kubernetes). Therefore, the correct group types used in Istio Service Mesh are Cluster and Service groups.

TheVCF 9.0 Logging and Auditing Guideexplains that audit information—includinguser logins, configuration changes, and API requests—is collected and made searchable throughVCF Operations for Logs. The extract states:

“VCF Operations for Logs provides centralized log aggregation and auditing for all VCF services, including audit trails of logins and configuration changes.”

Option A (audit logs per instance) is unnecessary because auditing is centralized. Option C (Enable Audit Events) is not a standalone step; it is a capability surfaced through Logs. Option D (Event logs in vCenter) covers only vCenter, not fleet-wide audit trails. Therefore, the correct step is tointegrate VCF Operations for Logs.

TheVCF Automation documentationdefines its primary use cases as:

Self-Service Catalog– “VCF Automation Service Broker provides a catalog for developers and operators to request services and blueprints.”

Application Dependency Mapping– achieved through integration with VCF Operations for Networks. The guide highlights: “Developers can discover application relationships and map dependencies through automated workflows in VCF Automation.”Alerting (A) is handled by VCF Operations, not Automation. VPC implementation (B) and Private AI (D) are supported solutions but not direct Automation use cases. Therefore, the correct answers areC (Self-Service Catalog)andE (Application Dependency Mapping).

Per theVCF 9.0 Automation Provider Management Guide:

Supervisor Activation: “Kubernetes-based workloads require Supervisor to be enabled in the Management Domain before deploying organizations.”

Region Configuration: “Organizations for All Applications must be deployed into a preconfigured Region, defined in the Provider Management Portal.”NSX Federation (D) is optional for multi-site deployments. Supervisor is not activated in workload domains (B) but centrally in the management domain. VMware Kubernetes Service (E) is enabled per tenant but not required before Organization creation. Thus, correct prerequisites areA and C.

Velero is an open-source Kubernetes backup and restore solution integrated into VMware Cloud Foundation for Kubernetes management. The VCF 9.0 Kubernetes Services Documentation describes it as:

“Velero provides backup, recovery, and migration of Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes.”

Key functionality includes:

Backup and restore of Kubernetes objects such as deployments, services, and namespaces.

Data protection for persistent volumes via storage snapshots.

Migration capabilities across clusters.

Analysis of incorrect options:

Publishing DNS records (A) is handled by CoreDNS or external DNS integrations, not Velero.

Monitoring cluster services (B) is the role of Kubernetes health checks and observability tools like Prometheus, not Velero.

Collecting logs and data (C) is done by logging stacks such as Fluent Bit or VCF Operations for Logs.

Therefore, Velero’s primary role is backup and restore of Kubernetes clusters.