VMware 3V0-21.23 - VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced Design

Create a dedicated storage network:

Creating a dedicated storage network ensures that storage traffic is isolated from general network traffic, improving both security and performance. This design choice helps prevent unauthorized access, minimizes the potential for network congestion, and ensures that storage traffic is not impacted by other workloads or services on the network.

Create a dedicated VLAN:

By placing storage traffic on its own VLAN, the architect ensures further network segmentation. This VLAN can be used exclusively for NFS traffic, improving both security and performance. It also allows for easier management and monitoring of storage traffic, while helping prevent unauthorized access from other parts of the network.

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.

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’shosts 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 architect conducts workshops with stakeholders to gather business and technical requirements.

Workshops provide a collaborative environment where the architect can interact with key stakeholders to gather both business and technical requirements. This approach helps ensure that the final design aligns with the goals and needs of the business while considering the technical constraints and capabilities.

The architect conducts multiple rounds of interviews with stakeholders, iteratively refining requirements.

Multiple rounds of interviews allow the architect to gather input over time, refining the requirements and addressing any evolving needs. This iterative approach ensures that the solution meets the stakeholders' expectations and adapts as new information emerges.

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.

Based on VMware vSphere 8.x Advanced documentation, the architect is designing a vSphere-based solution to meet three specific requirements: a recovery point objective (RPO) of 15 minutes, a primary and secondary site, and support for orchestration to address application dependencies. The solution must include two VMware technologies that collectively satisfy these requirements.

Requirements Analysis:

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes: The solution must ensure that no more than 15 minutes of data is lost in a disaster, requiring frequent data replication or synchronization between sites.

Primary and secondary site: The solution must support a disaster recovery (DR) architecture with two distinct sites, implying replication or failover capabilities between them.

Orchestration to address application dependencies: The solution must provide automated recovery workflows to manage the startup order and dependencies of multi-tier applications (e.g., ensuring a database starts before an application server).

Evaluation of Options:

A. vSAN stretched cluster:

Why incorrect: A vSAN stretched cluster provides high availability and disaster recovery by synchronously replicating data across two sites, achieving near-zero RPO and RTO. However, it is designed for high-availability scenarios within a single vSphere cluster spanning sites, not traditional DR with orchestration. vSAN stretched clusters do not natively provide orchestration for application dependencies (e.g., automated recovery plans or startup order), which is a key requirement. Additionally, stretched clusters require low-latency, high-bandwidth connections (typically <5ms RTT), which is not guaranteed in the provided information. This option does not fully meet the orchestration requirement.

B. vSphere HA:

Why incorrect: vSphere High Availability (HA) provides automatic VM restarts within a cluster in case of host failures, but it operates within a single site and does not support replication or failover between primary and secondary sites. vSphere HA does not address the 15-minute RPO requirement, as it does not replicate data, nor does itprovide orchestration for application dependencies across sites. This option is unsuitable for a multi-site DR scenario.

C. Site Recovery Manager:

Why correct: VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a disaster recovery solution designed for automated failover and failback between primary and secondary sites. SRM supports orchestration of recovery plans, allowing the architect to define the startup order and dependencies of multi-tier applications (e.g., starting a database before an application server). When paired with vSphere Replication, SRM can achieve an RPO of 15 minutes by orchestrating the failover of replicated VMs. SRM meets the requirements for primary/secondary site support, orchestration for application dependencies, and integration with replication technologies to achieve the required RPO.

VMware vSphere 8 documentation highlights SRM for automated DR orchestration, supporting recovery plans and integration with vSphere Replication for site-to-site failover.

D. vSphere Fault Tolerance:

Why incorrect: vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability by maintaining a live secondary VM on another host within the same site, with zero RPO and RTO for host failures. However, FT is not designed for multi-site disaster recovery, as it operates within a single cluster and does not replicate data between sites. FT also lacks orchestration capabilities for application dependencies and is resource-intensive, unsuitable for large-scale DR scenarios. This option does not meet the multi-site or orchestration requirements.

E. vSphere Replication:

Why correct: vSphere Replication is a hypervisor-based replication solution that asynchronously replicates VMs from a primary site to a secondary site, supporting an RPO as low as 15 minutes. It integrates with SRM to provide orchestrated recovery, ensuring application dependencies are addressed through SRM’s recovery plans. vSphere Replication meets the 15-minute RPO requirement and supports the primary/secondary site architecture by enabling data replication. When used with SRM, it provides a complete DR solution.