An architect is responsible for extending the hosting design for a customer. The customer has a mission-critical 3-node application which is load balanced in an active/active/passive configuration. The application administrator requests that the virtual infrastructure team be responsible for maintaining platform level availability. An organizational policy exists to mandate the highest possible availability for mission-critical applications.
Based on the resource requirements, the architect has made the following design decision:
The target vSphere cluster contains three VMware ESXi host servers
A combination of which additional four physical design decisions should the architect make to maximize availability of the application? (Choose four.)
Answer : A, B, E, F
The solution will create a VM-Host Affinity rule that specifies that workloads must run on hosts in a group.
Creating a VM-Host Affinity rule ensures that specific workloads are restricted to certain hosts, which can be useful to avoid placing critical applications on hosts that may not meet their availability requirements.
The solution will enable vSphere High Availability (HA) with restart priority set to 'Highest' for the application virtual machines.
Enabling vSphere HA ensures that virtual machines are automatically restarted on other hosts in the event of a host failure. Setting the restart priority to 'Highest' for mission-critical VMs ensures that these VMs will have the highest priority for restart if any issues arise.
The solution will enable vSphere Fault Tolerance with vSphere High Availability (HA) virtual machine component failure enabled.
Enabling vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) ensures that the application VMs are fully protected by creating a live shadow VM that runs in lockstep with the primary VM. In the event of a host failure, the shadow VM will take over instantly, providing continuous availability for the application.
The solution will create a virtual machine DRS group that contains all of the critical application workloads.
Creating a virtual machine DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) group for critical workloads ensures that these VMs are placed and migrated to the optimal hosts based on the cluster's resource requirements, improving availability and performance.
An architect is designing a new vSphere 8 environment and needs to plan the migration of virtual machines from the source vSphere 7 infrastructure.
The following has been captured about the source infrastructure and project:
All virtual machines operate supported versions of Microsoft Windows
All virtual machines have VMware Tools 11 or higher installed
vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode is configured
VMware PowerCLI is available in the environment
No budget is available for discovery tooling
The architect must capture and review active services from inside running virtual machines to inform the migration design.
Considering the information available, which method can the architect use to acquire the information required?
Answer : D
Given that VMware Tools 11 or higher is installed on all virtual machines and VMware PowerCLI is available in the environment, the architect can leverage PowerCLI to interact with VMware Tools and collect information about active services running inside the virtual machines.
VMware PowerCLI allows you to query virtual machines for information about their services by accessing the guest operating system, provided VMware Tools is installed and running. You can use PowerCLI cmdlets to retrieve service data, such as which services are running on the VM, their statuses, and other details necessary for planning the migration.
This option is cost-effective since there is no budget available for additional discovery tooling, and it aligns well with the existing tools and infrastructure already in place.
What are two benefits of the VMware Validated Solutions? (Choose two.)
Answer : A, C
VMware Validated Solutions offer prescriptive, step-by-step runbooks that help guide users through the deployment process. These runbooks ensure that the implementation follows VMware's recommended practices, reducing complexity and ensuring consistency across deployments.
VMware Validated Solutions are designed based on VMware's best practices, ensuring that the deployed solution is optimized for performance, security, and scalability. This helps organizations achieve a reliable and efficient infrastructure aligned with VMware's recommended guidelines.
An architect is holding a requirements workshop with a customer for a new vSphere solution design. The customer states that the solution should make it easy to identify and apply patches or updates to ESXi hosts, including the ability to pre-stage the files on the ESXi hosts.
Which design quality is being referenced by the customer?
Answer : B
The customer's requirement for making it easy to identify and apply patches or updates to ESXi hosts, including pre-staging the files, is focused on simplifying the management of the vSphere environment. This is a key aspect of manageability, which refers to the ease with which IT administrators can handle tasks like patching, updates, and configuration management in a consistent and efficient manner.
An architect is documenting the design decisions for a new vSphere solution. The following design decision has been made:
Create a separate vSphere cluster for the management workloads
What could the architect include as justification for this design decision?
Answer : C
Creating a separate vSphere cluster for management workloads ensures that these workloads, which are critical for monitoring, managing, and orchestrating the environment, do not compete for resources with compute workloads. This separation enhances the stability and reliability of management functions, even during periods of high resource utilization by compute workloads.
An architect is documenting the design for a new vSphere cluster. The customer provides the following information:
All ESXi hosts will use hardware from the same vendor
All ESXi hosts will be monitored for hardware related issues using the vendor's monitoring tooling
The vendor's monitoring tooling provides a plugin for vCenter to allow the hardware status to be visible
The customer also informs the architect of the following requirements:
Workloads must be automatically relocated to other hosts in the event that a host hardware is marked as degraded.
Workloads must be automatically restarted on other hosts in the event of a host failure.
What should the architect include in the design to meet these requirements?
Answer : D
To meet the customer requirements, we need to address the two specific scenarios:
Workloads must be automatically relocated to other hosts in the event that a host hardware is marked as degraded:
This requirement can be fulfilled by Proactive HA. Proactive HA is a feature of vSphere HA that works in conjunction with hardware health monitoring tools, such as the vendor's plugin for vCenter. When the vendor's monitoring tool marks a host as degraded (due to hardware issues), Proactive HA can automatically trigger the migration of workloads to other hosts, based on the Automation Level configuration.
Workloads must be automatically restarted on other hosts in the event of a host failure:
This can be managed using vSphere HA with the setting to restart VMs when a host fails. This ensures that in the event of a host failure, workloads are automatically restarted on available hosts in the cluster.
By enabling Proactive HA with an Automation Level of Automated, the architect ensures that degraded hosts are automatically handled (through workload migration) without manual intervention.
An architect is designing a new vSphere solution. The customer has provided the following information to describe how the solution will be used:
The solution will host development workloads
Administrators will utilize snapshots frequently, with snapshots sometimes retained for extended periods of time
Some of the workloads are sensitive to latency on the I/O of the storage
Storage for the workloads will be provided by a physical array
The physical array does not include a storage provider
All workloads must be hosted on the solution, there are no other vSphere environments available for use
Which design decision should the architect make to meet the needs of the customer?
Answer : A
VAAI (vSphere APIs for Array Integration) improves storage performance and offloads certain tasks (such as cloning, snapshots, and more) directly to the storage array. This is important because the customer will be utilizing snapshots frequently, and VAAI can help accelerate snapshot operations, reducing the impact on the ESXi host and improving overall performance.
Since the physical array does not include a storage provider and does not support vSphere Storage APIs - Storage Awareness (VASA) or Virtual Volumes (vVols), the solution should focus on using VMFS datastores with a VAAI-capable storage array. This setup allows better performance for snapshot operations and other storage tasks.