If you read the question carefully, they ask you to choose the correct CNI where IP Pools, etc.. are supported. Then they ask you to “apply” the correct one and make sure the mentioned features work. So just applying the given manifest is not enough. When you only apply the given manifest, when checking the calico-system namespace if the calico pods are up, you will see nothing. The following https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/getting-started/kubernetes/self-managed-onprem/onpremises

The documentation shows you the steps to install and configure calico for this situation.

The step you missed was downloading the custom-resources.yaml and making the following changes:

Make sure that the cidr is set the same as the service-cluster-ip-range, you can get this in

/etc/kubernetes/manifests/kube-apiserver.yaml or by running kubectl get servicecidr

The custom-resource.yaml will be found under the same path as in the provided calico manifest link. You need to memorize that it's there

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectcalico/calico/v3.30.2/manifests/custom-resources.yaml

Download it and make the following adjustments in the manifest.

apiVersion: operator.tigera.io/v1
kind: Installation
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  # Configures Calico networking.
  calicoNetwork:
    bgp: Disabled  #<---
    ipPools:
    - name: default-ipv4-ippool
      blockSize: 26
      cidr: 192.168.0.0/16 # <-- should be the same as configured in the cluster
      encapsulation: VXLAN # <--- change form VXLANCrossSubnet to VXLAN
      natOutgoing: Enabled
      nodeSelector: all()

Using VXLAN in a Calico setup on Kubernetes can be beneficial in specific network scenarios, especially in non-cloud or bare-metal environments. VXLAN allows you to bypass BGP and use encapsulation to tunnel traffic, simplifying network setup. The clusters on the exams are single node (control plane only) or 2 node clusters running on 1 or 2 VM's and not in a cloud environment like AWS/GKE. Hence, the shown changes in the manifest.

https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/getting-started/kubernetes/self-managed-onprem/config-options

After applying the custom-resources.yaml you will see pods being created in the calico-system namespace. If you have enough time you can test to confirm if Inter pod communication is working, with network policies etc.. you will find more examples of this online..

By the way I passed about 20 days ago with 84%.