VCP-DCV vSphere Architecture, Products and Solutions Practice Question
A vSphere administrator is designing a cluster that must survive the loss of a single ESXi host without losing any VM data. The design uses vSAN as the primary datastore. Which storage policy setting must be configured to provide this level of protection?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse performance-oriented policy settings such as striping with availability settings such as failures to tolerate.
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
✓
Failures to tolerate set to 1
To survive the loss of one host, the vSAN storage policy must specify failures to tolerate of 1. This causes vSAN to maintain a redundant copy of each object, so if a host fails the remaining copy remains accessible. Striping, reservation, and a failures-to-tolerate value of 0 do not provide host-failure redundancy.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Failures to tolerate set to 1
Why this is correct
Setting failures to tolerate to 1 means vSAN maintains one additional copy of data beyond the primary, allowing the cluster to survive a single host failure without data loss. For a three-host cluster this typically results in RAID-1 mirroring with two copies and a witness. This directly satisfies the requirement to survive one host loss.
- ✗
Number of disk stripes per object set to 1
Why it's wrong here
Disk striping controls how many disks an object is spread across for performance, not how many copies are maintained for availability. A stripe count of 1 means the object is not striped, which has no bearing on surviving a host failure. Striping affects performance and capacity placement, not redundancy.
- ✗
Failures to tolerate set to 0
Why it's wrong here
A policy with failures to tolerate of 0 keeps only one copy of each object. If a host fails, the data on that host becomes unavailable and the cluster cannot guarantee survival of that failure. This setting provides no redundancy and directly contradicts the requirement to survive a single host loss.
- ✗
Object space reservation set to 100 percent
Why it's wrong here
Object space reservation controls how much storage is thick-provisioned for an object. It affects capacity accounting and performance predictability, not the number of data copies or fault tolerance. Setting it to 100 percent does not protect against a host failure and may consume more capacity than necessary.
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.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This VCP-DCV question is part of Courseiva's 281-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 and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official VMware exam blueprint
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.