VMware VMware Certified Professional - VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Support 2V0-15.25 Exam Dumps: Updated Questions & Answers (December 2025)

This issue stems from an incorrect role assignment during the user creation process in VMware Cloud Director (VCF Automation).

Organization Administrator Role (Option D): This role grants full control, including visibility of the Administration tab (to manage users, groups, and settings), Data Centers, and Monitor tabs. If the user were an Admin, they would see all tabs.

Organization Auditor Role (Option A): This is a read-only role, but by definition, an Auditor can view anything an Organization Administrator can see (including the Administration settings), just without edit rights. Therefore, an Auditor would still see the Administration tab.

Organization User Role (Option B): This is a consumer-level role designed for deploying and managing vApps. By default, this role does not have access to the Administration tab or high-level organization settings. If the organization is new and has no vApps or VDCs populated yet, a user with this role might see a very restricted view (effectively just a dashboard or "Overview") because they lack the rights to see the administrative configuration menus.

Conclusion: The fact that the "Administration" tab is missing (implied by "only Overview is visible") identifies the user as an Organization User (or a restricted Custom Role) rather than an Administrator or Auditor.

When importing an existing vSphere environment into VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) as a workload domain, several strict prerequisites must be met. One of the key requirements documented in VCF 9.0 is that allVMkernel adapters (vmk ports)used for vSAN, vMotion, management, or other system trafficmust have statically assigned IP addresses. DHCP-assigned VMkernel IPs arenot supportedfor VCF workload domain bring-up or import operations.

In the provided scenario, the environment includes:

vSphere 8.0 U3

A 3-node vSAN OSA cluster

Two VDS switches

VMkernel adapters using DHCP

Before VCF can successfully validate and import the environment, the administrator must convert these VMkernel interfaces tostatic IP addressing. VCF uses IPAM assumptions and deterministic host networking configurations; DHCP introduces variability incompatible with automated lifecycle operations.

Option A (consolidating VDS) is unnecessary—VCF supports multiple VDS configurations during import.

Option B (upgrading to vSphere 9.0) is not required for import.

Option D (convert OSA to ESA) is impossible pre-import and not required—VCF supports OSA clusters.

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.

TheGlobal Inventory List (GIL)is only available whenmulti-vCenter SSO domain linkingis configured. In VMware Cloud Foundation, themanagement domain vCenteris deployed first and becomes theroot vCenterfor global inventory data. For workload domains, their vCenter Servers must beregistered into the same SSO domainandlinkedwith the management-domain vCenter in order for the global inventory data (VMs, hosts, clusters, content libraries) to appear.

If a workload domain vCenter is not SSO-linked, it operates in its own identity domain, and thereforecannot access or present Global Inventory, resulting in exactly the symptom described: the management domain vCenter shows the GIL, while the workload domain vCenter does not.

Option B (Supervisor Management) relates to vSphere with Tanzu and has no impact on Global Inventory.

Option C (inventory sync) is incorrect—there is no manual sync required; GIL relies entirely on SSO linking.

Option D (VIDB) is not related to vCenter linking or inventory visibility; it is used by VCF Identity Broker.

Therefore, the reason the Global Inventory is missing from the workload domain vCenter is thatSSO/vCenter Linking has not been configured, which is required for federation across all VCF vCenters.

In vSphere 7+ and VCF-managed clusters, thevSphere Cluster Services (vCLS)VMs must remain powered on for DRS, cluster health, and policy enforcement to function. If the vCLS VMs cannot power on,no workloads—including new VMs—can be deployedto the cluster because vSphere considers the cluster unhealthy.

A common cause is insufficient resources (CPU/memory), datastore issues, or policy conflicts preventing vCLS VMs from starting. VMware providesRetreat Modeas a troubleshooting mechanism to temporarily disable vCLS, allowing the administrator to deploy VMs and correct underlying issues. Enabling retreat mode:

Removes vCLS from the cluster

Restores ability to deploy VMs

Allows remediation of storage/placement issues

Can later be disabled to restore DRS health

Option A (deleting resource pools) does not restore vCLS VM power state.

Option B (disabling HA) does not affect vCLS behavior.

Option D (setting DRS automation level) does not correct vCLS placement problems.

When replacing certificates in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations, the system performs strict certificate chain validation. The error shown:

“Certificate chain validation failed due to 'Signature does not match’”

indicates that VCF Operations attempted to validate the presented certificate chain but detected that the server certificate did not correctly match the signing CA certificate. This occursmost commonly when the administrator pastes the server certificate and CA root/intermediate certificates into the wrong fields during import.

VCF requires the certificate bundle to be uploaded in the correct format:

Server certificate→ Server Certificate field

Intermediate certificates→ Intermediate Chain field

Root certificate→ Root CA field

If the chain order is wrong or the server certificate is mistakenly placed in an intermediate or root CA field, the cryptographic signature validation fails. This exact failure mode is documented in VMware certificate replacement workflows.

Option A is incorrect because including an IP address in a CSR does not invalidate chain signatures.

Option B is incorrect because an untrusted CA produces atrustfailure, not asignature mismatch.

Option C is unrelated: accessibility is not required for certificate validation.

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.

A Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation: When enabling vSphere Supervisor with NSX Classic (using the traditional NSX-T Data Center networking stack rather than the newer NSX VPC mode), the vSphere Workload Management wizard filters the list of available NSX Edge Clusters to ensure they are explicitly designated for use with Kubernetes workloads.

The "WCPReady" Tag Requirement: The primary mechanism vCenter uses to identify a valid, compatible Edge Cluster for Workload Management is a specific tag on the NSX Edge Cluster object. This tag must be WCPReady (case-sensitive).

Symptoms: If this tag is missing—which often happens if the Edge Cluster was created manually in NSX Manager rather than through the SDDC Manager automation—the validation process will fail to find any usable clusters. This results in the specific error message: "No valid edge cluster for VDS [UUID]", or simply an empty list of compatible clusters in the wizard.

Resolution: The administrator must log in to the NSX Manager, navigate to System > Fabric > Nodes > Edge Clusters, select the target cluster, and manually add the tag WCPReady (often with the scope "Created for", though the tag itself is the critical filter).

Why other options are incorrect:

B: Large Edge nodes are actually a requirement for vSphere Supervisor (Small/Medium are typically unsupported for this role), so deploying them as Large would make the cluster compatible, not incompatible.

C: vSphere Supervisor fully supports Distributed Connectivity (connecting directly to the VDS), so Central Connectivity is not a hard requirement causing this specific error.

D: While AVI (NSX Advanced Load Balancer) is a supported load balancer, the "No valid edge cluster" error occurs during the Edge Cluster discovery phase, preceding the load balancer configuration.

vSphere High Availability (HA) depends on theFDM agent(Fault Domain Manager) that runs on every ESXi host in the cluster. When an administrator enables HA on a cluster, vCenter automatically installs or updates thevmware-fdm VIBon each participating ESXi host. This VIB contains the HA agent binaries and is mandatory for HA services to start.

The error encountered:

"A general system error occurred: Failed to start fdm service on host"

is a classic and well-documented symptom of amissing or corrupted vmware-fdm VIB. When vSphere HA is toggled off and on, vCenter attempts to reinstall or restart the FDM agent; if the VIB is not present, HA cannot deploy successfully, and the FDM service fails to start.

Why the other answers are incorrect:

A. The vmware-fdm service is disabledESXi does not allow manual disabling of this system service in normal operations. If the service fails to start, the root cause is usually the absence or corruption of the VIB—not a disabled service.

C. Admission Control settings not configured correctlyAdmission Control errors affectVM failover capacity, not the ability to start FDM services.

D. HA startup policy not configured correctlyThere isno per-host HA startup policythat prevents FDM from starting.

In VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, VCF Operations (vROps-based) usespoliciesto control which alerts, symptoms, and metrics are evaluated for a given object. Creating an alert definition and symptom alone is not sufficient; the alert must beassociated with and enabled in a policythat is actively applied to the target object (in this case, a Virtual Machine). The documentation shows that when you create an alert definition, there is an explicitPolicies step, where you select the policy (for example, the default policy) so that the alert becomes active for objects governed by that policy.

The metric “Read Latency (ms)” is valid for virtual-machine–related objects: VCF Operations documents Read Latency metrics at the VM disk and VM–datastore link level (for Disk and Datastore metrics on Virtual Machines). Therefore, option B (metric not applicable) is incorrect. No requirement exists that such a performance alert must be forwarded from VCF Operations for Logs (D); log-based alerts are a separate alert type.

If the alert definition is not enabled in the effective policy for that VM, VCF Operations will not evaluate the symptom or generate the alert, and it will not appear in the alert pane—even though the definition technically exists. This matches optionCexactly.