EXAM GU IDE

Advanced Design VMware

vSphere 7.x

Exam Details (Last Updated: 02/15/2022)

The Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x Exam (3V0-21.21), which leads to the VMware Certified Advanced Professional -
Data Center Virtualization Design 2024 (VCAP-DCV Design 2024) certification, is a 60-item exam with a passing
score of 300 using a scaled method. Candidates are given an exam time of 150 minutes, which includes adequate time
to complete the exam for non- native English speakers.

Exam Delivery
This is a proctored exam delivered through Pearson VUE. For more information, visit the Pearson VUE website.

Certification Information
For details and a complete list of requirements and recommendations for attainment, please reference the VMware
Learning Services – Certification website.

Minimally Qualified Candidate

A minimally qualified or acceptable candidate (MQC) has about 12 months experience designing and deploying a vSphere
environment. The MQC is typically a solution architect, capable of developing a conceptual design given a set of customer
requirements, determining the functional requirements needed to create a logical design, and architecting a physical
design using these elements. The MQC has knowledge of compute, storage, networking and security, design principles,
capacity planning, disaster recovery and scalability, as well as sizing and compatibility. The MQC may occasionally require
assistance in carrying out more complex tasks
Exam Sections
VMware exam blueprint sections are now standardized to the seven sections below, some of which may NOT be included
in the final exam blueprint depending on the exam objectives.

Section 1 – Architecture and Technologies

Section 2 – Products and Solutions
Section 3 – Planning and Designing
Section 4 – Installing, Configuring, and Setup
Section 5 – Performance-tuning, Optimization, and
Upgrades Section 6 – Troubleshooting and Repairing
Section 7 – Administrative and Operational Tasks

DATASHEET | 1
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

If a section does not have testable objectives in this version of the exam, it will be noted below, accordingly. The objective
numbering may be referenced in your score report at the end of your testing event for further preparation should a retake
of the exam be necessary.
Sections Included in this Exam
Section 1 –Architectures and Technologies

Objective 1.1 – Differentiate between conceptual, logical and physical elements of a design

Objective 1.2 – Differentiate between functional and non-functional requirements

Objective 1.3 – Differentiate between Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability, Scalability and
Security (AMPRSS)

Section 2 – VMware Products and Solutions - There are no testable objectives for this section.

Section 3 – Planning and Designing

Objective 3.1 – Gather and analyze functional requirements

3.1.1 – Gather and analyze service-level agreement (SLA) requirements 3.1.2 – Gather

network, storage and compute requirements

3.1.3 – Gather workload design requirements

3.1.4 – Gather capacity and performance requirements

Objective 3.2 – Gather and analyze non-functional requirements

3.2.1 – Determine security requirements for a vSphere design

3.2.2 – Determine data protection requirements for a vSphere design

3.2.3 – Determine business continuity requirements for a vSphere design

3.2.4 – Determine disaster recovery requirements for a vSphere design

3.2.5 – Determine compliance requirements for a vSphere design

Objective 3.3 – Determine risks, constraints and assumptions for a design

Objective 3.4 – Create a vCenter Server logical design

3.4.1 – Design a single-site, multi-site, multi-region

deployment 3.4.2 – Define a virtual data center design

3.4.3 – Determine availability requirements for vCenter Server

Objective 3.5 – Create a vSphere cluster logical design

3.5.1. – Differentiate between workload or management clusters

3.5.2. – Define a workload cluster design Objective 3.6 – Create a vSphere host logical design

3.6.1 – Recommend compute resource requirements

3.6.2 – Identify and address scalability requirements

3.6.3 – Determine hypervisor deployment method

DATASHEET | 2
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Objective 3.7 – Create a vSphere network logical design

3.7.1 – Determine network protocol needs

3.7.2 – Design network segregation for different traffic types

3.7.3 – Determine physical and virtual networking topology

Objective 3.8 – Create a vSphere storage logical design

3.8.1 – Determine storage topology needs (e.g., SAN, local, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure or HCI)

3.8.2 – Evaluate storage protocols based on a given scenario/requirements

3.8.3 – Determine different storage segregation techniques based on a given scenario

3.8.4 – Determine physical and storage connectivity topology

Objective 3.9 – Create a workload logical design

3.9.1 – Determine workload sizing

3.9.2 – Determine workload placement

Objective 3.10 – Create a vCenter Server physical design

3.10.1 – Determine the correct sizing for vCenter Server based on workload requirements

3.10.2 – Map clusters to logical design Objective 3.11 – Create a vSphere cluster physical design

3.11.1 – Determine the appropriate Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Predictive Distributed Resource
Scheduler (pDRS), and Distributed Power Management (DPM) configurations based on requirements

3.11.2 – Determine the appropriate Proactive High Availability/High Availability configurations based on
requirements

3.11.3 – Determine the appropriate vSphere Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) configurations based
on requirements

3.11.4 – Determine the appropriate cluster size based on requirements Objective 3.12 – Create a vSphere
host physical design

3.12.1 – Identify the hypervisor deployment method

3.12.2 – Determine the appropriate host size based on requirements

3.12.3 – Determine the appropriate host configurations (network adapters, local storage, RAID controller)
based on requirements

Objective 3.13 – Create a vSphere network physical design

3.13.1 – Determine bandwidth needs based on requirements

3.13.2 – Determine NIC teaming and load balancing methods

3.13.3 – Design VMkernel adapters based on requirements

3.13.4 – Determine Network I/O Control (NIOC) configurations based on requirements

3.13.5 – Determine switch type (standard vs distributed) based on requirements

DATASHEET | 3
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Objective 3.14– Create a vSphere storage physical design

3.14.1 – Determine storage multi-pathing and load balancing methods

3.14.2 – Determine the Storage DRS configuration

3.14.3 – Determine appropriate datastore configurations based on requirements

3.14.4 – Determine the physical storage design based on requirements

3.14.5 – Determine appropriate storage policy based on requirements

Objective 3.15 – Create a workload physical design based on application requirements

3.15.1 – Determine workload virtual hardware (e.g., number of network interface cards (NICs) and type of
NIC)

3.15.2 – Design content library topology

Section 4 – Installing, Configuring, and Setup - There are no testable objectives for this section.

Section 5 – Performance-tuning, Optimization, Upgrades - There are no testable objectives for this

section. Section 6 – Troubleshooting and Repairing - There are no testable objectives for this section.

Section 7 – Administrative and Operational Tasks - There are no testable objectives for this section.

Recommended Courses
VMware vSphere: Design [v7]

DATASHEET | 4
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

References
Name Topics Products
https://www.vmware.com Architecting Microsoft SQL Server on VMware VMware vSphere 7.0
vSphere Best Practices
https://docs.vmware.com vSphere Resource Management, vSphere Security, VMware vSphere 7.0
vSphere Networking, vCenter Server Installation and
Setup, vSphere Availability, vSphere Storage, vSphere
Authentication, Setup for Windows Server Failover
Clustering, vSphere Virtual Machine Administration,
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 7.0,
vCenter Server and Host Management
https://docs.vmware.com/ vSAN Planning and Deployment VMware vSAN 7.0

https://docs.vmware.com vSphere Bitfusion 2 VMware vSphere Bitfusion

2.5
https://kb.vmware.com FAQ: VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data VMware vSphere 7.0
Protection (formerly known as VMware vStorage
APIs for Data Protection or VADP) (1021175);
Understanding Virtual Volumes (vVols) in
VMware vSphere 6.7/7.0 (2113013); VMware
response to ‘L1 Terminal Fault - VMM’ (L1TF -
VMM) Speculative-Execution vulnerability in
Intel processors for vSphere: CVE-2018-3646
(55806); Storage DRS FAQ (2149938)
https://kb.vmware.com Mixed, Passthru, HBA and RAID mode SAS or VMware vSAN 7.0
SATA IO Controller card support (53573)
https://blogs.vmware.com vSphere 7 – Content Library VMware vSphere 7.0

https://blogs.vmware.com vSAN Design Considerations – Deduplication and VMware vSAN 7.0

Compression
vSphere content in this exam is based on V7.0. Review all 7.0 release notes and material for features and function

DATASHEET | 5
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Sample Questions
Sample questions presented here are examples of the types of questions candidates may encounter and should not
be used as a resource for exam preparation.

Sample Question 1
An architect is designing a new vSphere environment to meet the following requirements:

• REQ01 The platform must provide a minimum of N+1 redundancy.

• REQ02 The recovery point objective (RPO) for all virtual machines within the environment is one
hour.

• REQ03 The production environment must be deployed into the primary data center.

• REQ04 The design must adhere to the company security standards, which include Payment Card
Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard compliance.

• REQ05 The platform must be capable of running 1,000 virtual machines across both data centers
concurrently.
Which two of the listed requirements would be classified as functional requirements? (Choose two.)

A. The platform must provide a minimum of N+1 redundancy.

B. The recovery point objective (RPO) for all virtual machines within the environment is one
hour.

C. The production environment must be deployed into the primary data center.
D. The design must adhere to the company security standards, which include Payment Card
Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard compliance.

E. The platform must be capable of running 1,000 virtual machines across both data centers
concurrently.
Answer: C,E
Sample Question 2
An application owner is concerned about their front-end web servers suffering an outage in the event of a
host failure.
Which functional requirement could the architect include in the application design to mitigate this concern?

A. The platform must include configuration rules to separate the web servers.
B. The platform must include configuration rules to restart the web servers upon host failure.
C. The platform must be configured with resource scheduling in fully automated mode.
D. The platform must include configuration rules to reset the web servers when guest
heartbeats are not received.
Answer: A

DATASHEET | 6
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Sample Question 3
An architect is assigned to report available capacity of a vSphere platform and is provided with the
following:

• Read-only access to the platform’s virtualization monitoring tool

• Full access to an internally developed and manually updated Configuration Management

Database (CMDB) tool

• Access to a document repository containing the go-live design documentation for each
application

• Links to vendor best practice documentation for many of the deployed applications

• Access to the company wide in-guest monitoring tool

Information extracted from which two sources will accurately provide the required information?
(Choose two.)

A. Virtualization monitoring tools

B. Application virtual machine design documents
C. In-guest monitoring tools
D. Application vendor best practice documentation
E. Support organizations Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Answer: A, C
Sample Question 4
An organization operates a vSphere platform that supports three tiers of virtual machines: Tier 1- for all
business-critical applications and services, Tier 2- for line of business services, and Tier 3- for test
and development virtual machines. The vSphere platform operates from three sites, named A, B and C;
and virtual machines from all tiers run at each location. The operations manager wants to improve
services so that the vSphere platform operates with virtual machines running on any site. The Chief
Executive Officer (CEO) requests that the architect redesign the disaster recovery (DR) solution to
meet the goals of the operations manager and notes that site A should not be considered as there are
plans to redevelop it as office space.

Which requirement should the architect include in the design to meet the goals of both the operations
manager and the CEO?

A. DR must be configured as Active/Passive between sites A and B. Tier 1, 2 and 3 virtual machines
must be operated from site A.

B. DR must be configured as Active/Active between sites A, B and C. Tier 1, 2 and 3 virtual machines
must be capable of running at any site.

C. DR must be configured as Active/Passive between sites B and C. Tier 1, 2 and 3 virtual machines
must be operated from site B.

D. DR must be configured as Active/Active between sites B and C. Tier 1, 2 and 3 virtual machines must
be capable of running at any site.

Answer: D

DATASHEET | 7
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Sample Question 5
An architect is tasked with designing the vSphere cluster layout for a customer. The customer is NOT sure
how many clusters are required or the number of hosts to use in any of the clusters. The customer has
provided the following requirements:

• The placement of Linux and Windows machines (end user virtual machines) needs to be
controlled for license compliance.

• Access to virtual machines such as Active Directory and DHCP (infrastructure virtual machines)
should be restricted to just the platform administration team.

• Infrastructure virtual machines should not prevent end user virtual machines from consuming
their allocated resources.

• Utilization for the current infrastructure's virtual machines is less than end user virtual machines.

• The platform needs to provide the ability to lifecycle manage the hosts without impacting end
user virtual machines.

• The platform needs to account for the predicted future growth of end user virtual machines being
very high, while for infrastructure virtual machines being very low.

• There are a total of 15 physical servers for use across the platform.

Which of the proposed cluster layouts would meet the customer's requirements?

A. One vSphere cluster of 12 hosts for Linux and Windows virtual machines and one vSphere
cluster of three hosts for infrastructure virtual machines.

B. One vSphere cluster of six hosts for Linux virtual machines, one vSphere cluster of six hosts
for Windows virtual machines and one vSphere cluster of three hosts for infrastructure virtual
machines.

C. One vSphere cluster of 15 hosts for all virtual machines with resource controls to give higher
priority to end user virtual machines.

D. One vSphere cluster of five hosts for Linux virtual machines, one vSphere cluster of five hosts
for Windows virtual machines and one vSphere cluster of five hosts for infrastructure virtual
machines.
Answer: B Sample Question 6

An architect is redesigning a storage environment to provide simplified management of a VMware

environment. The administrators have expressed the need to provision storage and apply a custom set of
array features granularly to virtual machines. They will re-use their existing shared storage platform as it
does support all modern VMware storage integrations.

Which two technologies or features are needed to support the requirements of this project? (Choose two.)

A. vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)

B. vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols)
C. Datastore Clusters
D. vSphere Storage DRS

DATASHEET | 8
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

E. Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)

Answers: A, B
Sample Question 7
An architect is designing a solution for an environment that has an application consisting of five resource-
intensive virtual machines.

Which design recommendation should the architect make to avoid resource bottlenecks?

A. Create a cluster with three hosts and only run the application virtual machines on this cluster.
B. Create a cluster with six hosts and use automated placement rules to keep the application virtual
machines together.

C. Create a cluster with six hosts and use automated placement rules to keep the application virtual
machines apart.

D. Create a cluster with four hosts and use rules to prioritize the resources for the application virtual
machines.

Answer: C
Sample Question 8
An architect is designing a solution for an environment with a limited number of operating system licenses.

How should the architect design the virtual infrastructure to meet the operating system
license requirements?

A. Place the hosts into a single cluster and enable automated placement of virtual machines.
B. Create rules to restrict placement of virtual machines to specified hosts.
C. Create a resource pool and only put the virtual machines that need the operating system licenses
within the pool.

D. Use standalone ESXi hosts and only apply the operating system licenses to those hosts.
Answer: B Sample Question 9

An architect is designing a new platform. Existing virtual machines will be migrated to this platform. The
migration process is defined as follows:

• A migration host will be loaded with virtual machines from the old platform.

• The migration host will be added to the desired new cluster.

• Virtual machines compute and storage will be migrated to desired hosts in the new platform.

• The migration host will be removed and added back to the old platform so the process can
restart.
The following characteristics are noted:

• A total of 800 virtual machines will be migrated.

• A total of 50 hosts will be available in the new platform.

DATASHEET | 9
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

• The migration host will have four paths to each of 512 connected LUNs.

Which size vCenter Server should be specified for the new platform?

A. Large
B. Small
C. Medium
D. Tiny
Answer: A
Sample Question 10
The DevOps team at an organization is preparing to build and package virtual machine (VM) images that will
be added to a content library for a new vSphere environment. Users will deploy virtual machines from the
content library. The solutions architect is gathering requirements to help the DevOps team decide between
the use of VM templates versus Open Virtualization Format (OVF) templates in the content library.

Which requirement would influence the design decision to use OVF templates in the content library?

A. Templates must be able to support license agreement acceptance during deployment.

B. Templates must be encrypted.
C. vSphere Storage DRS must be supported.
D. Templates must be automatically migrated to another ESXi host when a host is inaccessible.
Answer: A

Certification Requirements

VCAP-DCV Design 2024

DATASHEET | 10
Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Exam Contributors

Abdullah Abdullah

Benjamin Wold

Christopher Lewis

Feidhlim O’Leary

Frances Wong

Katherine Skilling

Paul McSharry

Pawel Piotrowski

Ryan Johnson

Simon Conyard

VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-9273 Fax 650-427-5001 www.vmware.com © 2024 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. The product or workshop materials
is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/download/patents.html.
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective
companies. VMware warrants that it will perform these workshop services in a reasonable manner using generally accepted industry standards and practices. THE EXPRESS WARRANTY SET
FORTH IS IN LIEU OF ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES AND DELIVERABLES PROVIDED BY VMWARE, OR AS TO THE RESULTS WHICH MAY BE OBTAINED THEREFROM.
VMWARE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY THIRD-PARTY SERVICES OR PRODUCTS IDENTIFIED OR REFERRED TO CUSTOMER. All materials provided in this workshop are copyrighted by
VMware ("Workshop Materials"). VMware grants the customer of this workshop a license to use and make reasonable copies of any Workshop Materials strictly for the purpose of facilitating such
company's internal understanding, utilization and operation of its licensed VMware product(s). Except as set forth expressly in the sentence above, there is no transfer of any intellectual property
rights or any other license granted under the terms of this workshop. If you are located in the United States, the VMware contracting entity for the service will be VMware, Inc., and if outside of the
United States, the VMware contracting entity will be VMware International Limited.

REV. 1/24