200-901 Infrastructure and Automation Practice Question
You are automating the deployment of a new software image on a fleet of Cisco Nexus switches using Ansible. The switches are in a production environment and must have minimal downtime. You have a maintenance window of 30 minutes per switch. Your playbook performs the following steps: 1) Copy the image to the switch via SCP, 2) Set the boot variable to the new image, 3) Save the configuration, 4) Reload the switch. During a dry run on a test switch, you notice that the reload step takes 8 minutes, but the copy step takes 15 minutes due to slow link speed. For the production rollout, you need to reduce the overall time per switch. Which approach should you take?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates focus on reducing the reload time or configuration steps, when the real bottleneck is the image transfer protocol; Cisco often tests the understanding that protocol choice (SCP vs. HTTP) directly impacts transfer speed in bandwidth-constrained environments.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use a local file server with HTTP for image transfer to improve speed
The bottleneck is the SCP copy time (15 minutes), which exceeds the 30-minute maintenance window when combined with the reload (8 minutes). Using HTTP for image transfer leverages a more efficient protocol with better throughput and lower overhead than SCP, which uses SSH encryption and can be slower on low-bandwidth links. This directly reduces the copy time, bringing the total per-switch time under the maintenance window limit.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Skip the save configuration step to save time
Why it's wrong here
Skipping save risks losing config if reload fails.
- ✓
Use a local file server with HTTP for image transfer to improve speed
Why this is correct
HTTP is generally faster than SCP for file transfer.
- ✗
Use a compressed image to reduce copy time
Why it's wrong here
Compression may not be supported and adds CPU overhead.
- ✗
Reload all switches simultaneously in the same maintenance window
Why it's wrong here
Simultaneous reload may cause network instability.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This 200-901 question is part of Courseiva's 989-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This 200-901 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Cisco certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the 200-901 exam.