VCP-DCV Configure and Manage vSphere Storage Practice Question
A company uses vSphere 8 with a vSAN cluster consisting of 4 ESXi hosts. Each host has a single disk group with one 400 GB NVMe cache SSD and two 2 TB capacity SSDs. The vSAN cluster is used to host a mix of production VMs and test VMs. During peak business hours, the vSAN performance service shows high write latency (over 30 ms) for several production VMs, while test VMs are not affected. The administrator examines the vSAN performance charts and notices that the disk groups are not balanced: one disk group shows over 80% used capacity and high congestion, while the others are below 40%. The administrator wants to improve performance without adding new hardware or changing the storage policy. The vSAN health service reports no errors. Which action should the administrator take first?
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
✓
Enable vSAN proactive rebalance.
Enabling vSAN proactive rebalance (Option D) automatically redistributes data across disk groups based on capacity and performance metrics, alleviating congestion on the overutilized disk group and reducing write latency. Option A (manual evacuation) is disruptive and not recommended as a first step. Option B (increasing disk groups) requires additional hardware. Option C (changing to RAID-5) does not address disk group imbalance and may increase overhead.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Manually evacuate data from the most utilized disk group.
Why it's wrong here
Manual evacuation is not a supported practice and could cause disruptions; vSAN handles rebalancing automatically.
- ✗
Increase the number of disk groups on the busiest hosts.
Why it's wrong here
Adding a disk group to a host would require an additional cache device and capacity devices, but the scenario’s bottleneck is an uneven capacity distribution across existing disk groups, not a lack of disk groups per host. This option is tempting because increasing disk groups can improve performance by distributing I/O across more cache and capacity tiers in a balanced cluster, which would be correct if the hosts were uniformly congested rather than one disk group being over 80% full while others remain below 40%.
- ✗
Change the storage policy to use RAID-5 erasure coding to reduce capacity overhead.
Why it's wrong here
Changing the policy does not address disk group imbalance and may require additional considerations.
- ✓
Enable vSAN proactive rebalance.
Why this is correct
Proactive rebalance automatically redistributes objects across disk groups to improve balance and performance.
Quick reference
RAID Level Comparison
| RAID Level | Min Disks | Fault Tolerance | Read | Write | Usable Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RAID 0 | 2 | None | Excellent | Excellent | 100% |
| RAID 1 | 2 | 1 disk | Good | Moderate | 50% |
| RAID 5 | 3 | 1 disk | Good | Moderate | 67–94% |
| RAID 6 | 4 | 2 disks | Good | Lower | 50–88% |
| RAID 10 | 4 | 1 disk per mirror | Excellent | Good | 50% |
RAID is not a backup strategy — it protects against disk failure but not against accidental deletion, ransomware, or site-level events.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This VCP-DCV practice question is part of Courseiva's free VMware 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 VCP-DCV exam.