What the exam feels like when you’re in it

This exam is not broad VMware trivia. It is narrow, product-specific, and very willing to test whether you know how vSAN 6.7 actually behaves instead of whether you recognize terms from marketing slides. Expect roughly 70 questions in 105 minutes, which gives you about 90 seconds per question. That matters because a lot of items are short scenario questions with just enough detail to push you toward the wrong vSAN design choice.

The question style I saw was mostly standard multiple choice, including single-answer and multiple-select. I did not get live labs, but several questions were written like mini design reviews: a cluster size, a failure tolerance requirement, a disk group layout, and then one answer that looks plausible until you remember a vSAN rule. Because of the time pressure, the practical tactic is this:

Spend your first pass answering the questions where you instantly know the vSAN behavior.
Mark anything involving policy math, stretched cluster behavior, dedupe/compression prerequisites, or resync/rebuild timing, because those are the ones that eat time.
If the interface allows review, use it. VMware exams typically do, and this one benefits from a second pass because wording around "can," "must," and "minimum" is where they hide traps.

A lot of people assume they can rely on general vSphere admin knowledge. Bad idea. This exam wants product boundaries. If a question asks what vSAN can do natively in 6.7, do not mentally import features from newer releases or from external storage products. I saw multiple questions where the wrong answer would be correct in a later version of vSAN, but not in 6.7.

Where to put most of your study time

If your prep time is limited, bias hard toward the areas where VMware likes to ask scenario-based questions: architecture and planning, storage policies, cluster behavior during failures, and operations/troubleshooting. The exam blueprint may split these into planning, administration, and troubleshooting language, but in practice the questions blend them.

The highest-return topics for me were:

vSAN architecture basics with exact limits and requirements
- Cache tier vs capacity tier behavior
- Hybrid vs all-flash differences
- Disk groups and how failures affect them
- Host, disk group, and device contribution to capacity and resilience
Storage Policy-Based Management on vSAN
- FTT/Failures to Tolerate logic
- RAID-1 mirroring vs RAID-5/6 erasure coding requirements
- Stripe width, object space reservation, checksum, IOPS limits, and when those settings actually matter
Stretched cluster and fault domain design
- Witness requirements
- Preferred/secondary site behavior
- Local failures vs site failures
- Policy implications in stretched environments
Health, maintenance mode, and rebuild/resync behavior
- Ensure accessibility vs full data migration vs no data migration
- 60-minute repair delay concepts
- What vSAN health checks are really validating
Hardware compatibility and deployment constraints
- HCL/VCG awareness
- ReadyNode vs custom build implications
- Controller mode, firmware, driver matching

If you are using the 100 practice questions on Truekia, don’t just score them. Tag each miss as one of these buckets: policy math, design prerequisites, operational behavior, or version-specific feature confusion. That classification is more useful than your raw score, because the real exam keeps coming back to those same buckets in different wording.

The storage policy questions are where VMware tries to catch you

The most exam-relevant skill is translating a business requirement into a valid vSAN policy and then checking whether the cluster can actually satisfy it. VMware loves giving a requirement like “tolerate one host failure with efficient capacity usage” and then seeing if you know when RAID-5/6 erasure coding is valid versus when you need RAID-1 mirroring.

The practical rules to drill until they are automatic:

FTT=1 with RAID-1 needs a minimum of 3 hosts.
FTT=2 with RAID-1 needs a minimum of 5 hosts.
FTT=1 with RAID-5/erasure coding needs a minimum of 4 hosts and is all-flash only.
FTT=2 with RAID-6/erasure coding needs a minimum of 6 hosts and is all-flash only.

The trap is that VMware often wraps those in business language instead of policy language. Example: if the question says “minimize capacity overhead while tolerating one failure,” that is a RAID-5 clue, but only if the cluster type and host count support it. If it’s hybrid, RAID-5 is wrong no matter how attractive it sounds.

Another recurring trick is mixing failure types. The exam may say “one disk group failure” or “one host failure” and then tempt you to answer based on simple FTT memorization. Remember:

vSAN stores components across hosts to satisfy policy.
A disk group failure is not the same thing as a host failure, but if all components for an object are laid out correctly, policy compliance depends on where components live.
VMware may ask what happens after a device or disk group fails: whether objects become absent, degraded, or noncompliant. Know those states conceptually.

Also pay attention to settings people ignore in real life:

Object Space Reservation (OSR): thin vs thick-like behavior. VMware may ask which setting reserves capacity up front.
Checksum: available on all-flash, protects against silent corruption, but can be disabled per policy.
Force provisioning: can let a VM be provisioned even if policy cannot be fully satisfied initially. This is a classic trap because candidates confuse “provisioned” with “compliant.”
Flash read cache reservation: legacy-sounding setting that still appears in exam material and can be used to test whether you know policy options, especially in hybrid discussions.

If you see a policy question with too many knobs, simplify it mentally to three checkpoints:

Is the requested policy valid for this vSAN architecture?
Is there enough host count/failure domain support?
If provisioned, will the object be compliant or merely accessible?

Cluster design traps: hybrid, all-flash, dedupe, compression, encryption

This exam repeatedly tests what features belong to all-flash only and what works in both architectures. VMware knows many candidates remember the feature names but not the deployment constraints.

Memorize these associations because they show up in disguised form:

Deduplication and compression: all-flash only, and enabled at the cluster level, not per VM.
Erasure coding (RAID-5/6): all-flash only.
Encryption: know the operational prerequisites and that it is a cluster feature with KMS integration, not a per-object trick.
Hybrid vSAN: flash is used for cache, magnetic disks for capacity; performance expectations and policy implications differ.

The gotcha VMware likes is giving you a customer requirement that sounds like a per-VM tuning request when the feature is actually cluster-wide. Deduplication/compression is the classic example. If the question asks how to enable space savings only for a subset of workloads, don’t pick dedupe/compression if the wording implies per-VM granularity. That is not how it works.

Another frequent angle is cache tier behavior. You need to know this beyond buzzwords:

In hybrid, cache tier handles both reads and writes.
In all-flash, cache tier is primarily for writes; reads come from capacity tier.

That detail matters because VMware may ask about a performance symptom or a design recommendation, and the wrong answer usually comes from applying hybrid logic to all-flash.

Hardware questions are also more exam-relevant than people expect. If a question mentions controller firmware, driver versions, disk types, or ReadyNode status, assume the right answer depends on VMware Compatibility Guide alignment. The exam is not asking you to memorize every supported controller; it is checking whether you know supportability comes from the validated combination of hardware, firmware, and driver, not just a vendor logo on the server bezel.

Stretched cluster and witness questions are deceptively nasty

If there is one topic to overprepare, it is stretched clusters. These questions look straightforward because the topology is easy to visualize, but VMware uses them to test policy placement, quorum logic, and failure handling all at once.

The essentials you should be able to explain from memory:

A vSAN stretched cluster has two data sites and a witness host at a third site.
The witness contributes witness components for quorum; it does not store customer data the way data sites do.
The design is meant for site-level resilience, not just ordinary host-level resilience.
Network latency and site placement guidance matter; VMware may phrase this as a design validation question.

Common exam traps here:

Confusing fault domains in a standard cluster with a stretched cluster. They are related concepts but not interchangeable.
Forgetting that the witness is not a normal capacity contributor for data placement.
Picking an answer that tolerates a host failure when the requirement is clearly to tolerate a site failure.

When a question asks how to meet an availability requirement across two sites, translate it like this:

If they care about surviving an entire site outage, think stretched cluster policy behavior first.
If they care about rack or chassis awareness within one site, think fault domains.

VMware also likes “what happens after a partition” style questions. You do not need to become a distributed systems theorist, but you do need to remember that quorum and witness votes are the heart of the design. If an answer ignores the witness role in determining object accessibility after a site communication issue, it is usually wrong.

Maintenance mode, resync, and rebuild behavior: learn the consequences, not just the menu names

A surprising amount of this exam is operational. Not “click path” operational, but “if you choose this action, what happens to data availability and compliance” operational. Maintenance mode is a favorite.

Know exactly what these mean in vSAN terms:

Ensure accessibility
- Minimal movement.
- Objects remain accessible, but may become noncompliant temporarily.
- Good when you need speed and accept temporary policy deviation.
Full data migration
- Moves enough data so objects remain compliant with policy after the host enters maintenance.
- More disruptive and capacity-intensive.
No data migration
- Fastest option, but can leave objects inaccessible if they depended on components on that host.

The exam trap is wording like “which option minimizes data movement while maintaining access” versus “which option preserves full compliance.” Those are different answers. VMware expects you to know the operational tradeoff, not just the labels.

You should also understand the repair delay concept. vSAN does not immediately rebuild every absent component after a failure; there is a delay before full rebuild starts. That makes sense operationally because transient failures happen. Exam questions may ask what occurs immediately after a host failure versus after the timer expires. If you only memorized “vSAN rebuilds automatically,” you’ll miss the nuance.

For resync-related items, focus on:

Why objects become degraded, absent, or noncompliant.
What triggers resynchronization.
Why capacity headroom matters during remediation and policy changes.

If a question mentions changing a policy from RAID-1 to RAID-5, or increasing FTT, assume VMware is probing whether the cluster has enough resources to reconfigure objects and whether the result is immediate compliance or a staged resync process.

Health checks, troubleshooting signals, and the ‘easy’ questions that aren’t

The exam includes plenty of troubleshooting questions that look basic until you notice they are testing which tool or health category is the most direct fit. VMware likes asking about symptoms in terms of health service findings, not just generic “performance is slow.”

Areas worth drilling:

vSAN Health Service categories
- Hardware compatibility
- Network health
- Data health
- Cluster health and limits
Performance service basics
- What level of visibility it gives you
- Why you would use it before making policy or hardware assumptions
Disk or controller failure symptoms
- How they surface in health and object state
Network configuration issues
- vSAN VMkernel connectivity, multicast history confusion, and version-specific assumptions

One big warning: be careful not to answer based on newer vSAN releases. vSAN 6.7 sits in an awkward place where many admins remember later capabilities better than the 6.7 behavior. If a network or health question sounds familiar, confirm in your head that the feature existed in 6.7 in the form described.

The “easy” gotcha topics are:

ReadyNode vs custom hardware: the exam may not ask “what is a ReadyNode,” but instead “which approach simplifies supportability validation.”
Witness traffic and management assumptions: not all traffic roles are interchangeable just because they share physical links.
Disk claims and device usage: cache and capacity roles are not arbitrary; device class and architecture matter.

When you review practice questions, don’t just memorize the right option. Write a one-line reason why each wrong option is wrong in vSAN 6.7 terms. That is the fastest way to spot VMware’s trap patterns.

A realistic final-week checklist for vmware-5v0-2119

The last week should not be broad review. It should be a vSAN 6.7 cleanup pass focused on the topics that generate the most expensive mistakes.

Use this checklist:

Rebuild from memory the minimum host counts for:
- RAID-1 FTT=1 and FTT=2
- RAID-5 FTT=1
- RAID-6 FTT=2
Write down which features are all-flash only.
Review hybrid vs all-flash cache behavior until you can answer without hesitation.
Practice 15-20 questions specifically on:
- Storage policy outcomes
- Maintenance mode choices
- Stretched cluster behavior
- Health/troubleshooting interpretation
Revisit VMware docs or notes for:
- Witness host role
- Fault domains
- Dedupe/compression scope
- Encryption prerequisites
- HCL/VCG validation logic

With the 100 Truekia practice questions, I would split them this way in the final stretch:

Day 1-2: do only policy and design questions; ignore score, focus on why answers fail prerequisites.
Day 3-4: do operations and troubleshooting questions; especially maintenance mode and health service items.
Day 5: timed mixed set to simulate the 105-minute pace.
Day 6: review only misses and flagged weak areas.
Day 7: memorize the hard requirements and version-specific limitations, not broad concepts.

One final blunt point: if you are shaky on exact requirements, this exam punishes intuition. vSAN 6.7 questions often have two answers that are both “good ideas” operationally, but only one is supported, compliant, or possible in that version. Your edge comes from knowing the product boundaries precisely, especially around policy validity, all-flash-only features, stretched cluster design, and maintenance mode consequences.