VMware Updated 3V0-21.23 Exam Questions and Answers by raymond

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.

The storage may not have capacity to accommodate 20% year-over-year virtual machine growth.

This is a risk because, while the assumption is that the storage hardware has sufficient capacity, there is a possibility that the hardware may not be able to support future growth, especially if the customer's workload grows faster than expected. Documenting this risk ensures that the design considers potential capacity constraints.

The customer may not have an existing licensing subscription that covers features the architect intends to use.

This is a risk because although the assumption is that the customer will provide licensing, there may be discrepancies between the features required for the design and the customer’s existing licensing. This risk ensures that the architect verifies that the customer’s licensing aligns with the solution requirements.

Based on VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced documentation and the provided requirements, the architect is designing a lifecycle management strategy for a brownfield vSphere 8 solution using heterogeneous server hardware (Intel and AMD processors from Vendors A and B) across two physical sites. The solution must support 5,000 workloads, minimize the number of clusters, ensure no service impact during upgrades, and utilize all existing hardware, which is on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) with 36 months of vendor support remaining.

Requirements and Context Analysis:

Heterogeneous hardware: The environment includes Intel-based servers (Vendor A) and AMD-based servers (Vendor B) with varying CPU cores and RAM configurations.

Deployment:

Primary site: Intel-based servers (Vendor A: 10 servers with 2 x 20-core, 512 GB RAM; 10 servers with 2 x 24-core, 768 GB RAM).

Secondary site: Both Intel-based (Vendor A) and AMD-based servers (Vendor B: 20 servers with 2 x 16-core, 512 GB RAM; 10 servers with 1 x 24-core, 256 GB RAM).

REQ001: Support 5,000 workloads across two sites, requiring all available hardware.

REQ002: Minimize the number of clusters to simplify management.

REQ003: Ensure no service impact during upgrades, implying a robust lifecycle management strategy.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM): vLCM in vSphere 8 supports managing ESXi host upgrades and patches using baselines or images. Baselines are collections of patches and updates, while images are specific ESXi versions with defined components tailored to hardware.

Key Considerations for Lifecycle Management:

Heterogeneous hardware: Different processor architectures (Intel vs. AMD) may require specific drivers, firmware, or ESXi components, impacting vLCM remediation.

vLCM baselines vs. images:

Baselines: Allow applying common patches and updates across hosts, even with different hardware, as long as the updates are compatible.

Images: Require a specific ESXi image tailored to the hardware, which may differ between Intel and AMD hosts due to architecture-specific requirements.

No service impact during upgrades: Suggests the use of features like vSphere High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vMotion to ensure workloads are migrated during host upgrades, supported by clustering.

Minimize clusters: Implies grouping hosts into as few clusters as possible, but heterogeneous hardware may require separate clusters or careful vLCM configuration to manage upgrades effectively.

Evaluation of Options:

A. The different processor architectures across both sites will remediate against a shared vSphere Lifecycle Manager baseline:

Why correct: vSphere Lifecycle Manager baselines allow applying common patches, updates, and extensions across hosts with different hardware architectures (Intel and AMD) as long as the updates are compatible with the VMware HCL. This assumption supports lifecycle management by enabling a unified remediation strategy across both sites, regardless of processor differences. It aligns with minimizing clusters (REQ002) by allowing hosts with different architectures to be managed under a single baseline, and it supports no service impact (REQ003) by leveraging vLCM’s ability to orchestrate upgrades with vMotion and DRS. The use of baselines is more flexible than images for heterogeneous environments, making this a valid assumption for the architect to make.

The solution will deploy VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus on all hosts within the cluster.

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus offers advanced networking and storage features that will support the required high availability, performance, and management capabilities. Features such as Distributed Switches and Network I/O Control (NIOC) are critical to meeting the business-critical application and performance requirements for the latency-sensitive stock trading application.

The solution will deploy a single vSphere Distributed Switch with each host connected to it.

A vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is ideal for managing network configurations centrally across multiple hosts, which meets the requirement for centralized vSphere operational management. It also ensures consistent network configurations and simplifies network management at scale.

The solution will configure Network I/O control to ensure that system-level bandwidth does not impact workload network traffic.

Network I/O Control (NIOC) is essential for prioritizing network traffic, ensuring that latency-sensitive workloads are not impacted by other system-level or less critical traffic. This is crucial for the performance requirements of the stock trading application.