VMware 2V0-15.25 - VMware Certified Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Support

When upgrading fromVCF 5.0 to VCF 9.0, the upgrade workflow requires that theSDDC Manager be upgraded firstbefore any other component bundles (vCenter, ESX, NSX) become visible. This is explicitly stated in the VMware Cloud Foundation upgrade process:the upgrade bundles for the management domain components are dependent on the SDDC Manager version. The online depot will not present the 9.0 upgrade bundles for vCenter, ESX, or NSX until the SDDC Manager itself has reached the target major version (in this case, 9.0).

This is because SDDC Manager contains the updatedLifecycle Management (LCM)engine and updatedbundle manifests, which are required to understand, download, and orchestrate the remaining component upgrades. Attempting to download the other bundles without upgrading SDDC Manager first is not supported.

Options B and D (download tools) are incorrect because the issue isnot that the bundles are missing from the depot, but that SDDC Manager 5.x cannot interpret 9.0 component bundles. Option C (upgrade to 5.2 first) is also incorrect because the VCF 5.x → 9.x upgrade path is directly managed by the upgrade planner once SDDC Manager is upgraded.

Thus, the correct resolution is toupgrade the SDDC Manager to 9.0, after which the remaining component bundles will become available.

In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 with vSAN ESA, storage policies must match the capabilities of the existing cluster. The scenario describes a5-node vSAN ESA clusterwhere the vSAN Default Storage Policy isRAID-1 (FTT=1). The administrator attempts to apply a2 Failures – RAID-6policy, which ESA supportsonly on clusters with at least 7 nodes. Because the cluster has only five nodes, the policy fails immediately—this is expected and documented in the vSAN ESA design specifications.

Since RAID-6 is not an option and capacity is low, the administrator must look for a method to reclaim storage usage without requiring additional nodes or unsupported policy changes. Converting VMs fromthick provisioning to thin provisioningis a safe and effective mitigation approach. Thin provisioning reduces consumed space by allowing disks to grow only as needed, immediately recovering unused blocks. This is a standard vSAN-supported method to temporarily alleviate capacity pressure.

Enabling encryption (A) or compression (D) doesnotreduce capacity usage retroactively and may actually increase overhead. Using RAID-5 (B) is also not possible because RAID-5 requiresat least 6 ESA-enabled hosts.

Application Monitoring in VCF Operations uses Telegraf agents running inside virtual machines. These agents forward metrics to theCloud Proxy, which then sends them to the Operations analytics cluster. One of the most common reasons an agent stops reporting data—especially exactly24 hoursafter deployment—isclock drift or time mismatchbetween the VM (running the Telegraf agent) and the Cloud Proxy.

VCF Operations enforcesstrict timestamp validation. If the timestamps from the agent are outside the acceptable drift window, the Cloud Proxyrejectsincoming data as invalid. In this case, the Telegraf agents appear installed and functional, but no new metrics are received by the analytics engine.

This is a well-known issue documented in VMware Aria/VCF Operations agent-based monitoring, where:

Agents send metrics with local system time.

Cloud Proxy enforces time validation to prevent corrupt metric ingestion.

A drift >5 minutes commonly results inzero data collectiondespite healthy connectivity.

Options B and C cannot stop data flow after exactly 24 hours; they would preventinitialcollection. Option D (virtual hardware/tools compatibility) affects VM operations butnotTelegraf metric time-stamp validation.

During VMware Cloud Foundation bring-up,time synchronization across all management components is mandatory. The VCF Installer, ESXi hosts, NSX Manager nodes, and vCenter must all sync tothe same NTP servers. If even one host or component has a time skew exceeding VMware’s allowed limits, VCF will report time sync errors during bring-up or post-deployment.

The administrator validated NTP configuration, DNS resolution, ping connectivity, and time synconly on the VCF Installer appliance, butdid not verify the ESXi hosts' time synchronization. NSX Manager obtains its time reference from the underlying ESXi host during deployment, so if the ESXi hosts are not synchronized with the same NTP sources, NSX Manager will drift, triggering the exact error described.

Option B (iptables) does not apply—the VCF Installer does not block outbound NTP by default.

Option C refers to workbook formatting, which would fail earlier in deployment—not after NSX Manager is running.

Option A is incorrect because ESXi should never use “host time sync”; NTP must be used.

To resolve the "partial or invalid or not reachable" error when configuring the VCF 9.0 Offline Depot, the administrator must address two critical misconfigurations related to the protocol and the file path mapping:

Switch to HTTPS (Option E):VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 enforcesHTTPSby default for all depot connections to ensure security. The administrator's configuration uses http://, which the VCF Fleet Manager will reject (or fail to connect to) unless the system has been explicitly modified via internal properties files to allow insecure transport. Changing the Repository URL to https://10.138.148.160/depot/ aligns with the default security requirements of the VCF 9.0 binaries download and validation process.

Reconfigure Web Server Pathing (Option A):The command --depot-store=/VCF instructs the download tool to create a repository structure rooted at /VCF. The administrator then copied this "downloaded folder"intothe /depot folder on the web server, resulting in a nested path (e.g., /var/www/html/depot/VCF/...). However, the configured URL is .../depot/, which points to the parent directory where the required index.json or metadata files are not immediately visible. The administrator must reconfigure the web server (e.g., via DocumentRoot or Alias settings) to explicitly share the specific /vcf/ (or /VCF/) folder content at the target URL so the Fleet Manager can locate the manifest files.

In VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation for All Apps, avSphere Namespacecan span multipleSupervisor Zones. However, workloads—including catalog item deployments—canonlybe deployed into zones that are explicitlyassigned to that Namespace. The user in the scenario successfully deploys intozone1andzone2, which confirms that those zones are correctly associated with the Namespace.

The failure to deploy intozone3, while deployments into the other zones work, strongly indicates thatzone3 is not part of the Namespace configuration.

This behavior matches how Supervisor Zones function:

A zone must beadded to the Namespacein Supervisor configuration.

If the zone is not associated,VCF Automation will not present it as an eligible deployment location, and deployment into that zone fails.

Option A and D (project roles) are incorrect because insufficient permissions would prevent deploymentinto any zone, not a single missing zone.

Option B (Namespace Class) is irrelevant because Namespace Classes define resource limits, not which Supervisor Zones the Namespace is mapped to.

In vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA),Auto-Policy Managementdetermines which default storage policies can be used based on the number of hosts in the cluster. RAID-5 and RAID-6 policies require a minimum number of hosts to satisfy fault domain and component placement rules.

ForvSAN ESA, the minimum hosts required are:

RAID-1 (FTT=1)→ minimum3 hosts

RAID-5 (FTT=1)→ minimum4 hosts

RAID-6 (FTT=2)→ minimum6 hosts

In this scenario, the administrator deployed athree-host ESA cluster. Since RAID-5 requires at leastfourESA-capable hosts, vSAN Auto-Policy Managementautomatically falls back to RAID-1, the highest level of resilience possible with the available cluster size. This results insignificantly higher storage consumption, which matches exactly what the administrator observed.

Option A is incorrect because RAID-5 is fully supported on ESA—but only with enough hosts.

Option C (Force Provisioning) does not change the default policy selected.

Option D (Host Rebuild Reserve) does not control RAID policy selection.

To collect detailed per-VM CPU metrics—especiallyCPU Ready (%RDY)—the correct command-line utility on an ESXi host isesxtop. This tool provides real-time, low-level performance data for CPU, memory, disk, and network usage, and is the authoritative method for diagnosing CPU contention issues in VMware environments.

When troubleshootinghigh CPU Ready times, esxtop allows administrators to:

View CPU contention at the VM level

Inspect co-stop, wait, and scheduling delays

Monitor NUMA distribution and pCPU saturation

Capture historical performance snapshots using batch mode

The other options do not provide the necessary VM-level CPU scheduling metrics:

A. vimtop: Only available on vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), not ESXi; doesnotshow VM CPU ready.

B. esxcli: Used for configuration and health checks; not for real-time CPU metrics.

C. vim-cmd: Used to manage VMs via vSphere API bindings; not a performance monitoring tool.

In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, supplemental storage such as NFS is fully supported for workload domains when configured correctly. When an NFS datastore mounts successfully in vSphere but users cannot write data, the issue almost always lies in theexport permissions on the NFS server. vSphere will allow mounting a read-only NFS export, but write operations will fail silently at the VM or guest OS level.

VCF documentation confirms that ESXi requires explicitread/write export permissions, typically configured per-host or by IP subnet, on the NFS server. Even if network connectivity and VM-level access appear healthy, incorrect server-side permissions prevent ESXi from executing write operations.

Option A is incorrect because NFS servers are not validated by the HCL for write capability.

Option B (rebooting the host) is unnecessary and unrelated to permission enforcement.

Option D (MTU mismatch) may cause performance issues, not write-access failures.

Thus, the next troubleshooting step is to verify that the ESXi hosts haveread/write accesson the NFS share, makingCthe correct answer.