3V0-21.23 VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced Design Questions and Answers

Based on the requirements provided, the architect should recommend iSCSI for the following reasons:

Existing Storage Array: The existing storage array does not support integration with vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA), which is required for vVols and VMware vSAN. This means that vVols and vSAN cannot be used without significant upgrades or changes to the storage infrastructure.

Existing Fibre Channel Connectivity: The storage array has Fibre Channel connectivity, but it is limited to 2 x 8 Gbps interfaces and is not compatible with advanced features required by modern solutions like vVols. In addition, Fibre Channel is traditionally complex to manage and requires specialized knowledge, which may not align with the existing vSphere administration team's expertise.

Support for NFS Storage: The storage array can be configured to support NFS storage, which is an efficient, simpler-to-manage option compared to traditional Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Since iSCSI is also IP-based, it aligns well with the existing vSphere environment.

Scalability and Simplicity: iSCSI allows for easy integration with vSphere and is a highly scalable option for expanding storage across two sites, which meets the requirement of 5,000 compute workloads across two physical sites. It is also easier to manage compared to Fibre Channel and vVols.

Strict Lockdown Mode is the correct choice because it restricts all access to the ESXi host directly, ensuring that configuration can only be performed through VMware vCenter. This is in line with the requirement that configuration can only be done via vCenter.

Strict Lockdown Mode disables the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and SSH services, which aligns with the customer's requirement to have these services disabled for security purposes.

When the shell sandbox is enabled on ESXi hosts, it restricts the execution of commands within the shell to ensure that only authorized or safe commands are allowed. This provides a level of isolation that limits the potential for accidental or malicious commands to be run in the shell, enhancing security while still providing necessary administrative access.

The desired consolidation ratio for the target platform is 10:1:

The consolidation ratio is a key technical requirement as it directly influences the planning for the deployment and resource allocation in the new VMware Cloud platform. It defines how many virtual machines can be consolidated per physical host in the target environment, which is critical for the sizing and resource planning.

A VMware Aria Operations report containing current resource usage:

The VMware Aria Operations report provides actual data on the current resource consumption of the application. This report is essential for understanding how much resource the application currently uses and helps in determining the necessary capacity in the target platform. This is a technical requirement since it informs resource allocation, scaling, and performance expectations.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager helps reduce operational expenditure (OPEX) by automating the patching and management of the vSphere environment. It provides centralized management for host updates, ensuring consistency across the environment and reducing the manual effort required for ongoing operations. This leads to reduced operational overhead, which directly addresses the requirement to reduce OPEX.

This statement supports the requirement for ensuring that business-critical applications have the necessary network bandwidth and maintain consistent quality of service (QoS). By creating a distributed switch and enabling Network I/O Control, you can prioritize network traffic and ensure that the necessary bandwidth is allocated to critical applications, improving their performance and quality of service.

To physically separate the NSX host overlay network traffic from other management network flows, the architect should use multiple physical adapters. This approach allows for the segmentation of different types of network traffic by assigning them to separate physical adapters, ensuring that the overlay network traffic used by NSX does not interfere with management traffic. This helps in maintaining optimal performance and security by isolating these network types at the physical level.

Deploy all DPU-enabled VMware ESXi hosts into a dedicated VMware vSphere cluster:

Since the customer has amission-critical, latency-sensitive stock trading application, it is essential todedicate resourcesto these workloads to avoid contention with other less critical workloads. By placingDPU-enabled ESXi hosts in a dedicated cluster, the architect ensures that the hardware acceleration provided by the DPUs can be fully utilized by the latency-sensitive application without interference from other workloads.

Configure network offloads compatibility to support DPUs:

DPUscan offload network-related tasks from the CPU, such as network packet processing, and ensure better performance and lower latency. Byconfiguring network offload compatibilityin VMware ESXi, the system will leverage the DPU’s capabilities to offload network traffic processing, reducing the CPU burden and improving network performance for latency-sensitive applications.

Deploy new vSphere distributed switches (8.0.0) and connect the new DPU-enabled hosts:

For optimal support and performance withDPU-enabled hosts, the architect should deployvSphere distributed switches (VDS) version 8.0.0. The newer version will be optimized for the hardware and provide better integration with DPUs, ensuring the latest features, improvements, and support for DPUs, thus maximizing the performance and minimizing latency for mission-critical applications.

To support the business goal of automated, centralized, and efficient management of the data center, joining all vCenter instances to a single vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) domain helps in streamliningmanagement and improving security. By centralizing authentication and enabling single sign-on, the organization can achieve a more efficient and consistent management experience across the entire data center. This eliminates the need to manage multiple authentication systems, allowing for better integration, automation, and centralized control over all vCenter instances.

A subscribed content library is the best design choice for managing and centralizing virtual machine templates in this scenario. Here's why:

Centralized Management: A subscribed content library allows templates to be stored in a central location and made available to all clusters within the vCenter instance. Any new templates added to the central content library are automatically made available to all subscribed clusters, meeting the requirement for templates to be centrally stored and easily accessible by all clusters.

Automatic Updates: When a new template is added to the central content library, it becomes automatically available to all clusters that subscribe to it, fulfilling the requirement for automatically available new templates.

VM Template Deployment: Administrators can deploy new virtual machines directly from the template instances stored in the content library, which ensures that the deployment process is streamlined and consistent.

Enable vSphere with Tanzu on a cluster deployed at a remote location.

VMware Cloud Foundation remote clusters can be deployed to extend the functionality of vSphere with Tanzu to remote locations. This allows for containerized workloads to be managed and orchestrated using the same tools as the primary environment, providing consistent management of Tanzu clusters across multiple sites.

Provide resources for virtual machines at an edge location.

Remote clusters can be deployed at edge locations to provide computing resources for workloads that need to run close to the data source. This use case is particularly useful for applications that require low latency or need to process data locally before sending it to the central cloud infrastructure.

The database must be backed up every day during the maintenance window of 1:00AM and 3:00AM.

This is a logical design requirement because it specifies the timing for the backup operations. It's important to define backup schedules to align with the maintenance window, ensuring minimal disruption to production workloads.

The database will be backed up using an API-based backup solution.

This is a logical design decision that specifies the method of backup. Using an API-based backup solution is a modern, efficient way to ensure consistent and application-aware backups of databases.

In this scenario, the requirement is to ensure that only Production workloads are recovered in the event of a host failure during maintenance, while Development workloads are not restarted. This can be achieved using vSphere HA settings.

By configuring the vSphere HA Host Failure Response to Restart VMs, the system will attempt to restart VMs when a host failure occurs.

Setting the Restart Priority for Development VMs to Disabled ensures that these VMs will not be restarted during a failure event, even though the cluster is set to restart VMs in the event of a host failure. This way, only the Production workloads will be restarted, meeting the customer’s requirement.

The customer's request to use multiple network connections for the ESXi management network is aimed at improving the resilience of the network, which directly supports the availability of the management network. By using multiple network connections (such as NIC teaming), the solution ensures that if onenetwork connection fails, the other connections can maintain connectivity, thus improving the availability of the ESXi management network.

Performance refers to the system’s ability to meet the required service levels under various conditions, including handling spikes in memory demand. In this case, the architect is ensuring that the cluster can handle memory spikes of up to 20% without contention, which is a key performance requirement to ensure that the workloads run optimally during peak business hours.

The ability to accommodate these memory demands without impacting performance directly aligns with ensuring that the system performs as expected under peak load conditions.

The company policy requires storage separation of workloads by departments. To meet this requirement, the architect should design the storage architecture to create a dedicated storage volume for each department. This approach allows for logical separation of each department’s data, ensuring that workloads from one department are isolated from the others.

Creating new storage volumes for new departments provides scalability. As new departments are added, new volumes can be provisioned without affecting the existing volumes or requiring reconfiguration of the existing department’s storage.

vCPU to pCPU ratio may not exceed 5:1.

This ensures that the virtual CPU (vCPU) allocation is balanced with the physical CPU (pCPU) resources. A ratio that exceeds 5:1 can lead to CPU contention, negatively impacting performance. By maintaining this ratio, the architect ensures that the workloads have sufficient CPU resources for optimal performance.

CPU purchases will favor clock speed and last level cache over cores per socket.

This is an important performance consideration. Choosing CPUs with higher clock speed and larger last-level cache (LLC) ensures that workloads requiring higher single-threaded performance are optimized. This decision favors workloads that benefit from faster CPU processing and larger cache sizes, improving overall performance.

Additional ESXi hosts will be added to the cluster when CPU or memory utilization exceeds 70% for 3 consecutive business days.

This performance-related decision ensures that the environment remains responsive under load. Adding additional hosts when resource utilization exceeds thresholds helps prevent bottlenecks and ensures continued optimal performance by distributing workloads across more physical hosts.

For NIC Teaming, all NICs in the same port group must be in the same layer 2 broadcast domain.

This is a key consideration for NIC teaming. All NICs in a team must be in the same Layer 2 broadcast domain to ensure that traffic is properly routed and that the NIC team can work as expected within the vSphere environment. This is necessary for network redundancy and communication consistency.

To increase availability, the NICs within a NIC team should be from different physical NIC Cards.

To eliminate single points of failure, NICs within the same NIC team should be sourced from different physical NIC cards. This way, if one physical NIC card fails, the other NICs in the team will still be able to handle network traffic, ensuring availability.

NIC Teaming requires a minimum of two physical network connections.

NIC Teaming relies on having at least two physical NICs for redundancy and load balancing. This is a basic requirement to prevent single points of failure in network connectivity. With only one NIC, there would be no fault tolerance.

The customer's requirements include the following:

Carry over existing VLANs for workloads: This can be easily achieved with a vSphere distributed switch (VDS), as it supports the configuration of VLANs and ensures that they can be applied to multiple ESXi hosts across the data center.

Networking for storage must not share the data path with workload traffic: By using aggregated uplinks in the VDS configuration, the architect can easily separate workload traffic and storage traffic by using different uplinks or VLANs. Aggregated uplinks ensure that there is sufficient bandwidth for both workloads and storage, while keeping them logically separated in terms of traffic management.

Add additional VLANs: A VDS supports the dynamic addition of VLANs. New VLANs can be added and managed centrally, reducing the complexity and management overhead when scaling the network.

Reduce management overhead: The use of a single VDS significantly reduces management complexity compared to managing multiple vSphere standard switches (VSS). With VDS, network configuration and management are centralized and simplified across all ESXi hosts.

Given that the new replacement servers have two 100 GB network cards, the aggregated uplinks in a VDS configuration will provide the required network capacity while ensuring that traffic is properly segmented and scalable.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) is used to manage ESXi host configurations and software versions in a consistent and streamlined manner. In this case, the architect needs to account for the heterogeneous hardware across two sites (Intel and AMD-based servers).

Since Intel and AMD processors are incompatible for remediation with a single vSphere Lifecycle Manager image, the different processor architectures should be grouped by site (not across sites). Within each site, vLCM can manage a single image per processor architecture, ensuring that each site’s hosts with compatible processors are remediated consistently. Intel-based servers will be managed with one image and AMD-based servers with another image, but they can be managed in separate sites.

This approach avoids the issue where heterogeneous hardware with different processor types would need separate images. By keeping them within the same site, the architecture simplifies the lifecycle management and meets the requirement for minimizing clusters and ensuring service availability during upgrades.

The design became constrained when the customer required the use of the corporate Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) solution. The security team's intervention and insistence on using the corporate Active Directory effectively limited the options available for the authentication solution, as OpenLDAP was no longer a valid choice. At this point, the solution's scope was restricted to ensure compatibility with the customer's existing Active Directory infrastructure, which imposed a specific requirement on the design.

The customer is requesting that the solution meet security requirements, specifically around handling sensitive information (such as credit card data). The need to mask or hash stored information for compliance with industry standards (e.g., PCI-DSS) is a security-focused design requirement. This ensures that sensitive data is protected and compliant with regulations, making security the primary design quality being requested.

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.

The goal here is to ensure that, in the event of a host failure, the workloads are restarted in the correct order based on their dependencies:

Workload 3 (Identity Broker) is required by both Application A and Application B as a dependency. It needs to be set to High Restart Priority, ensuring that it is restarted before the other dependent workloads.

Workload 4 (Reporting Tool) is required by Application B and Application C, so it should be set to High Restart Priority to ensure it is available before the other dependent workloads (like Workload 5).

Workload 5 (Management Tool) is required by Application C and should have a Medium Restart Priority, meaning it will be restarted after Workload 4.

Workloads 1 and 2 (Self-Service Portal and Database) have Low Restart Priority because they are dependent on Workload 3 (and Workload 4), but they do not have further critical dependencies after Workload 3, so they should be restarted last in the event of a failure.

This setup ensures that all applications can be recovered properly in the event of a host failure, with each workload restarting in the correct order to maintain the application dependencies.