A financial services company is deploying a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)-based solution for its core...

Per the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Framework, performance validation must ensure the infrastructure can sustain peak workload loads while meeting defined SLAs. Two essential validation techniques recommended are:

Stress Testing – Used to evaluate system stability and response under extreme load conditions to ensure the infrastructure can handle transient peaks beyond average operations.

Load Simulation in a Staging Environment – Used to emulate production workloads and transaction patterns to validate scalability, vSAN throughput, and resource elasticity.

The documentation emphasizes that “stress and scalability testing must be conducted using representative workloads in a controlled environment before production cutover,” ensuring predictable system behavior and compliance with SLA targets.

Other options such as recovery testing (A) or vendor benchmarks (E) serve disaster recovery and reference purposes, not performance validation. Deploying directly to production (D) without validation contradicts VCF design best practices.

References (VMware Cloud Foundation documents):

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.2 Design and Validation Guide — “Performance and Scalability Validation Methods.”

VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 Architecture Overview — “Workload Validation and Stress Testing Framework.”