VMware 2V0-13.25 - VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architect

The Conceptual Model identifies high-level requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks. The Logical Design translates those into how solution components (clusters, networks, storage, security zones, etc.) are structured to meet dependencies and requirements.

Physical Design comes after Logical Design and defines specific hardware, IP addresses, VLANs, etc.

High Availability Design is a subset of the logical/physical design focusing only on resiliency.

Configuration Guide is implementation-level documentation, not design.

Thus, the Logical Design defines how the infrastructure’s capabilities are arranged to satisfy conceptual dependencies.

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.

Per the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Framework, performance validation must ensure the infrastructure can sustain peak workload loads while meeting defined SLAs. Two essential validation techniques recommended are:

Stress Testing – Used to evaluate system stability and response under extreme load conditions to ensure the infrastructure can handle transient peaks beyond average operations.

Load Simulation in a Staging Environment – Used to emulate production workloads and transaction patterns to validate scalability, vSAN throughput, and resource elasticity.

The documentation emphasizes that “stress and scalability testing must be conducted using representative workloads in a controlled environment before production cutover,” ensuring predictable system behavior and compliance with SLA targets.

Other options such as recovery testing (A) or vendor benchmarks (E) serve disaster recovery and reference purposes, not performance validation. Deploying directly to production (D) without validation contradicts VCF design best practices.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Guide — “Performance and Scalability Validation Methods.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Overview — “Workload Validation and Stress Testing Framework.”

To enforce strict separation of monitoring data, logs, and access control, deploying two separate VCF Operations instances is the recommended solution. This ensures that each department (HR and Finance) has a completely isolated monitoring stack, including dashboards, alerts, log retention, and user roles.

Although scopes and index partitions can provide some level of logical segregation within a single instance, they do not guarantee complete security isolation, especially in environments with strict compliance or multi-tenancy concerns. Deploying two separate instances ensures compliance with data isolation and privacy requirements, making it the most secure and compliant option.

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 the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Architecture and Design Guide, under the section “VKS Cluster Networking”, VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS) supports two Container Network Interface (CNI) options — Antrea and Calico — for pod and service networking. The documentation explicitly states:

“A VKS cluster provisioned by the VKS supports two CNI options: Antrea (default) and Calico.”

It further explains that Antrea is automatically selected as the default and requires no explicit configuration unless the user specifies Calico in the cluster YAML file.

Antrea, developed by VMware, leverages Open vSwitch (OVS) for networking and supports advanced features such as network policy enforcement, encapsulation, and traffic visibility, making it the optimal default CNI for VKS clusters. Calico, using Linux bridge and BGP, remains an alternative for organizations requiring specific network topologies or integrations.

Thus, unless otherwise defined, all new VKS workload clusters in VMware Cloud Foundation are deployed using Antrea as the default network provider to maintain consistency, integration with NSX networking, and full compatibility with VCF lifecycle management.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 Design Guide – “VKS Cluster Networking: Antrea (default) and Calico options.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.4 – “Set the Default CNI for VKS Clusters” (System-defined default: Antrea).

Advanced Memory Tiering with NVMe optimizes memory performance, essential for workloads that are latency-sensitive.

NSX Enhanced Data Path (EDP) is specifically designed for high-performance, low-latency packet processing, critical in real-time applications.Options like Global Deduplication or Deep Snapshots can negatively impact latency due to additional processing overhead.

When gathering business requirements, VMware’s VCF Design and Planning methodology (referenced in the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture and Design Guide) specifies that architects must first analyze the business-level inputs that define availability, manageability, and compliance objectives. The documentation identifies Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and Organizational Structure as key influencing factors on design decisions because they define the scope of reliability, operational responsibility, and risk tolerance of the solution.

SLAs determine the required uptime, RPO/RTO targets, and recovery policies, directly impacting design elements such as stretched clusters, backup configuration, and resource redundancy. Similarly, the organizational structure affects operational models and determines how administrative domains, roles, and tenancy will be separated — influencing whether to implement single-tenancy or multi-tenancy within VCF Automation and how management domains are segregated.

Other options such as product versions, VM sizes, or storage capacity are important for implementation and scaling phases, not the business requirements stage. VMware explicitly distinguishes between business requirements (goals, SLAs, governance) and technical requirements (capacity, configuration) in the VCF Design Library.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Design Guide — Business Requirements Gathering Framework (VCF-DES-PLN-BREQ-001).

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Overview — SLAs and Organizational Models Impact on Design Decisions.

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Library — Mapping Business Requirements to Design Factors.

The VCF 9.0.1 Design Guide provides sizing best practices for vSAN stretched clusters, emphasizing capacity planning to accommodate failover conditions. It states:

“When sizing a stretched vSAN cluster, consider that in case of a site failure, all resources from the failed site must be supported by the surviving site. Therefore, compute and storage should not exceed 50% utilization per site.”

This translates into a maximum target utilization of ~45% compute and ~40% storage per site, ensuring compliance with the company’s overall 90% capacity policy when combined across both sites.

A homogeneous cluster configuration (A) ensures consistent performance and predictable recovery during failover.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.1 Design Guide — “vSAN Stretched Cluster Capacity Planning and Sizing.” (pp. 874–885)

VMware vSAN Design and Sizing Reference — “Cluster Utilization Planning for Failover Scenarios.”