NCP-MCI-6.5 Nutanix Certified Professional - Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI) v6.5 exam Questions and Answers

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Prism-Central-Guide-Prism-v5_10:mul-pc-install-scratch-c.html

 According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result4, Prism Central can be installed manually on an AHV cluster by using three disk images: boot, home, and data. These disk images must be downloaded from the portal for the Prism Central VM and uploaded to an image service on the AHV cluster. The boot image contains the operating system and kernel for Prism Central. The home image contains the configuration files and logs for Prism Central. The data image contains the database and application files for Prism Central.

According to the web search results, one recommended configuration change to improve throughput for a custom backup application that requires a 2TB disk and runs on Windows is to span the 2TB disk across four vDisks. Spanning is a technique that allows you to create a single logical disk from multiple physical disks. Spanning can improve throughput by distributing I/O requests across multiple disks and reducing contention5. To span a disk across four vDisks, the administrator should create four vDisks of equal size (500 GB each) and attach them to the VM. Then, in Windows Disk Management, create a spanned volume from the four vDisks and format it as NTFS6.

Step 1 ---> Login into Prism Element.

Step 2 ---> Select the Gear Icon at top right of the page.

Step 3 ---> Click Upgrade Software.

Step 4 ---> Select the component to upgrade.

Step 5 ---> Click download.

Step 6 ---> Once the download completes, select upgrade.

Invalid:-

1 - Select Prism Central.

2 - Select user login.

3 - On left select upgrade Prism Central.

According to the Nutanix Prism Central Guide, to configure a syslog server in Prism Central, you need to specify the transport protocol (TCP or UDP) and the IP address/port of the syslog server.

According to the web search results, two steps that should be taken to prepare for relocating an AHV cluster to a new datacenter during a maintenance window are:

• Shut down all user VMs in the cluster: This step is necessary to ensure that there is no data loss or corruption during the relocation process. The user VMs can be shut down either individually or in bulk by using the Prism Element web console or the acli command-line interface1.
• Stop all Nutanix Files clusters: If the AHV cluster hosts any Nutanix Files clusters, they should be stopped before relocating the cluster. Nutanix Files clusters are composed of one or more virtual machines that provide file services to clients. Stopping a Nutanix Files cluster will stop all the file server VMs and release the resources they consume2. The Nutanix Files clusters can be stopped by using the Prism Element web console or the ncli command-line interface3.

According to the web search results, a consistency group is a group of related applications or services that must be recovered together in order to work properly, and this means more than being recovered at the same time67. They also typically need to be recovered to the same point in time6. Therefore, to meet the requirement of protecting all VMs of a multi-tier application at the same time, the administrator must create a consistency group for the application and place all VMs in it8. This way, the administrator can apply data protection policies and schedules to the entire consistency group as a single unit8.

Stargate is the AOS process that handles all I/O operations for the cluster. It is responsible for determining whether an I/O from a user will be written to the OpLog or to the Extent Store, based on the type and size of the I/O. Stargate also performs data tiering, compression, deduplication, and erasure coding1. Stargate runs on every CVM and communicates with other Stargates to ensure data locality and redundancy2.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result1, the administrator can change the frequency of checks and alerts for the System Non-Root Partition Usage in Prism Element by going to the Health Dashboard > Manage Checks > Schedule. The administrator can select the check name, such as disk_usage_check, and click on Edit Schedule. The administrator can then choose the desired frequency, such as every 15 minutes, every hour, or every day, and click on Save. This will change how often the check runs and alerts are generated.

According to the web search results, one possible cause of inter-VM communication failure between hosts is that the switch is not configured to allow VLAN 15 traffic. VLAN 15 is the default VLAN ID used by AHV for internal communication between CVMs and hosts. If the switch blocks or drops VLAN 15 packets, it will prevent inter-VM communication across hosts4. To enable full inter-VM communication, the administrator should update the switch to specifically allow VLAN 15 traffic on the ports connected to the AHV hosts.

According to the Nutanix Community1, host maintenance mode is used to safely migrate all the user virtual machines (VMs) in the host and make sure no VMs are running on the node. If a VM can’t be migrated to another host, you need to shut down the VM for the host to enter into maintenance mode.

According to The Virtualist2, a storage container is a logical segmentation of a storage pool that can be mounted as an NFS datastore on ESXi hosts. You can choose a replication factor (RF) for each storage container, which determines how many copies of data are stored across different nodes.

According to the web search results, the two actions that the administrator should perform to determine if the current cluster can accommodate the new VMs are:

• Utilize Optimize Resources for VM efficiency: Optimize Resources is a feature in Prism Central that helps the administrator improve the efficiency and performance of their VMs by identifying and resolving issues such as overprovisioning, inactivity, constraints, or bullying3. By using Optimize Resources, the administrator can reclaim unused resources and optimize the resource allocation for their VMs3.
• Determine utilization with Cluster Runway: Cluster Runway is a feature in Prism Central that helps the administrator estimate how long their cluster can continue to run normally based on the current consumption rate of CPU, memory, and storage resources4. By using Cluster Runway, the administrator can see how adding more VMs will affect the resource utilization and capacity of their cluster4.

Data locality is the capability of storing VM data on the node where the VM is running and ensuring that the read I/O does not have to traverse the network. Data locality is a unique feature of Nutanix that provides high performance and low latency for VMs by minimizing network traffic and crosstalk. Data locality works by writing one copy of the data local to the VM and the other copy (or copies) on other nodes. When a VM migrates to another node, Nutanix also moves its data to the new node and serves all I/O requests locally. Data locality also adapts to changing workloads and access patterns by dynamically moving data to where it is needed most1.

According to the Migration to a different processor web search result2, live migration of VMs depends on the source and destination hosts having the same CPU functions (CPU flags). Live migration requires the source and destination hosts to have CPUs from the same manufacturer, and only CPU functions which both hosts support are provided (same CPU generation, or by using VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC)). If the administrator adds a node with older generation processors to an existing AHV cluster with newer generation processors, then live migration of VMs is prevented between newer and older processors, unless EVC is enabled.

The best way to fix this issue is to increase the amount of memory assigned to the VM from the Prism web console. This option allows the administrator to modify the VM configuration without accessing the CVM or shutting down the VM. The Prism web console provides a simple and intuitive interface for managing Nutanix clusters and VMs1. To change the memory allocation for a VM, the administrator can follow these steps2:

• Go to the VM dashboard
• Select the VM from the VMs list
• Choose Update
• Adjust the amount of memory assigned to the VM
• Click Save

https://next.nutanix.com/installation-configuration-23/nutanix-vlan-34170

"An administrator has been tasked with increasing security on Nutanix cluster by disabling password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead moving to key-based SSH, What is the easiest way for the administrator to meet these needs? Enable Cluster Lockdown and provide an RSA key."

 Cluster Lockdown mode disables password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead requires key-based SSH. To enable Cluster Lockdown mode, you need to provide an RSA key.

Therefore, by enabling Cluster Lockdown mode and providing an RSA key, you can increase security on Nutanix cluster by disabling password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead moving to key-based SSH with minimal effort.

https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/streamlined-login-and-increase-security-key-based-ssh-login-37397

https://hyperhci.com/2019/07/22/nutanix-lcm-upgrade-process-failed-trouble-shooting/

https://next.nutanix.com/blog-40/net work-load-balancing-with-acropolis-hypervisor-6463

An Application Security Policy is a security feature in Nutanix AHV that can be used to restrict network communication between virtual servers based on a variety of criteria, such as IP address, port, and protocol. By creating a policy that restricts communication to authorized hosts and applying it to the servers in enforce mode, the administrator can prevent unauthorized communication between virtual servers.

https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result1, route injection is used to maintain I/O operations in the cluster when the Stargate service becomes unavailable on a single CVM on an AHV node. Route injection is a mechanism that allows the CVMs to communicate with each other and redirect the I/O requests to another healthy CVM in the cluster. Route injection uses the Linux kernel routing table to add or delete routes dynamically, based on the availability of the Stargate service on each CVM.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result1, erasure coding is a data savings technique that utilizes stripes and parity calculation in a Nutanix cluster. Erasure coding increases the usable capacity on a cluster by reducing the replication factor of data blocks. Instead of replicating data, erasure coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk or node failure. Erasure coding can save up to 50% of storage space compared to replication factor 2, and up to 75% compared to replication factor 32.

 According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result1, the name of the internal bridge used by AHV nodes and CVMs is br0. The internal bridge is an Open vSwitch (OVS) bridge that connects the AHV host management interface, the CVM interface, and the VM vNICs. The internal bridge also acts as a gateway for the CVM and VM traffic to reach the external network through the host physical NICs.

Enable Memory Overcommit on the over-provisioned VMs is the most efficient resolution to enable additional VMs to be created. Memory overcommit allows VMs to use more memory than physically available on a host by compressing and swapping memory pages to storage1. This can improve memory utilization and increase VM density on a cluster1. However, memory overcommit is not supported when HA is configured to use reserved hosts, so you may need to disable HA reservation on the cluster before enabling memory overcommit1.

According to the Nutanix Prism Central Guide, Prism Central allows you to apply storage policies on a per VM basis using Category, so that the VM uses the storage configuration defined in the storage policy. Using a storage policy, you can manage parameters of VMs, such as encryption, type of or lack of data compression, and IOPS or Throughput throttling values to be applied to the entities.

A native VLAN is a VLAN that is assigned to untagged traffic on a trunk port of a switch. A trunk port can carry traffic from multiple VLANs, but it needs to have a native VLAN to handle traffic that does not have a VLAN tag. The native VLAN is usually VLAN 1 by default on most switches, but it can be changed to any other VLAN number2. When creating a network profile on Nutanix, the administrator needs to specify the VLAN ID that matches the VLAN configuration on the physical switch. However, if the network profile uses the same VLAN ID as the native VLAN on the switch, it will cause network connectivity issues for the VMs connected to that network profile. This is because Nutanix AHV uses 802.1Q tagging for all network traffic, including traffic in the native VLAN. The switch will expect untagged traffic in the native VLAN and will drop any tagged traffic in that VLAN3. To fix this issue, the administrator needs to change the VLAN field from vlan. 1 to vlan. 0 in the network profile on Nutanix. This will tell Nutanix AHV to send untagged traffic for that network profile and match the native VLAN configuration on the switch4.

When a VM is connected to a Nutanix managed network, the IP address is assigned when the VM is powered on. A Nutanix managed network is a network that is created and managed by Prism Central using IP address management (IPAM). IPAM allows Prism Central to automatically assign IP addresses to VMs from a pool of available addresses in a subnet. IPAM also tracks the IP address usage and availability across clusters and networks4.

When a VM is connected to a Nutanix managed network, the administrator can choose one of the following assignment types for the IP address:

• Assign Static IP: This option allows the administrator to manually specify a static IP address for the VM from the subnet range. The IP address will not change unless the administrator changes it.
• Assign with DHCP: This option allows Prism Central to dynamically assign an IP address for the VM from the subnet range using DHCP. The IP address may change depending on the DHCP lease time and availability.
• No Private IP: This option allows the administrator to skip assigning an IP address for the VM. This option is useful for scenarios where the administrator wants to use an external IPAM solution or assign an IP address later5.

Regardless of the assignment type, the IP address is assigned when the VM is powered on. This is because Prism Central needs to communicate with the hypervisor (AHV or ESXi) to configure the virtual NIC (vNIC) of the VM with the IP address information. This communication can only happen when the VM is in a powered on state6.

References: 4: IP Address Management - Prism Central Guide 5: Creating a New Report - Prism Central Guide 6: IP Address Assignment - AHV Networking Guide

The correct answer is A. Long term storage of data which is written once and read infrequently.

Erasure Coding is a feature that increases the usable capacity on a Nutanix cluster by reducing the amount of data replication. Instead of replicating data, Erasure Coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. The capacity savings of Erasure Coding is in addition to deduplication and compression savings1.

Erasure Coding is most beneficial for scenarios where the data is written once and read infrequently, such as long term storage of archival data, backup data, or cold data. This is because Erasure Coding has some trade-offs and limitations that may affect the performance and availability of the cluster. Some of these trade-offs and limitations are2:

• Erasure Coding requires more CPU and memory resources than replication, as it involves more complex calculations for encoding and decoding data.
• Erasure Coding increases the network bandwidth consumption, as it involves more data transfers between nodes for encoding and decoding data.
• Erasure Coding reduces the resiliency of the cluster, as it can tolerate fewer node failures than replication. For example, a cluster with redundancy factor 2 can tolerate one node failure with replication, but only two disk failures with Erasure Coding.
• Erasure Coding is not effective for workloads that have many overwrites or random writes, as it involves more overhead for updating the parity information.
• Erasure Coding is not supported for some features, such as volume groups, file server VMs, or Metro Availability.

Therefore, if an administrator needs to configure a container on a Nutanix cluster, they should enable Erasure Coding only if the container will store data that is written once and read infrequently. This way, they can maximize the capacity savings of Erasure Coding without compromising the performance and availability of the cluster.

According to the Nutanix Files Guide, Nutanix Files instances are composed of a set of VMs (called FSVMs). Files requires at least three FSVMs running on three nodes to satisfy a quorum for high availability. By default, Files deploys three FSVMs when you create a file server instance.

According to the Nutanix Volumes - Recommendations And Best Practices web search result3, two actions that the administrator should take when designing the Volume Group are:

• Distribute workload across multiple virtual disks: Use multiple disks rather than a single large disk for an application. Consider using a minimum of one disk per Nutanix node to distribute the workload across all nodes in a cluster. Multiple disks per Nutanix node may also improve an application’s performance. For performance-intensive environments, we recommend using between four and eight disks per CVM for a given workload.
• Enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling): Receive-side scaling (RSS) allows the system to use multiple CPUs for network activity. With RSS enabled, multiple CPU cores process network traffic, preventing a single CPU core from becoming a bottleneck. Enabling RSS within hosts can be beneficial for heavy iSCSI workloads. For VMs running in ESXi environments, RSS requires VMXNET3 VNICs. For Hyper-V environments, enable VMQ to take full advantage of Virtual RSS.

The correct answer is B. The existing and the expansion node are on different VLANs.

The output shows that the new node has a br0-up bond with four interfaces: eth0, eth1, eth2, and eth3. The bond is configured with LACP active and LACP fallback set to false. This means that the bond will only work if the upstream switch supports LACP and is configured to form an LACP group with the four interfaces. However, the output also shows that the bond has no IP address assigned to it, which indicates that the bond is not operational. One possible reason for this is that the existing and the expansion node are on different VLANs, and the upstream switch is not configured to allow the VLAN traffic on the LACP group. This would prevent the new node from communicating with the cluster and being discovered by the Expand Cluster function in Prism.

To verify this, the administrator can check the VLAN configuration on the upstream switch and compare it with the existing nodes. Alternatively, the administrator can use the “manage_ovs show_uplinks” command on an existing node and compare the output with the new node. If there is a VLAN mismatch, the administrator can either change the VLAN configuration on the switch or on the new node to match the existing nodes.

when you create a custom alert policy, you can choose between two types of thresholds: Static Threshold and Behavioral Anomaly. Static Threshold allows you to set a fixed value for the metric that triggers the alert. Behavioral Anomaly allows you to use machine learning to detect abnormal behavior based on historical data.

If you select Behavioral Anomaly as the threshold type, you cannot set a warning level for the alert. You can only set a critical level that indicates how much deviation from normal behavior is considered an anomaly3. Therefore, the Alert warning if field is greyed out when you select Behavioral Anomaly.

The best way for the administrator to configure Prism to send encrypted messages to a set of recipients is to set the SMTP Security Mode to STARTTLS. This will ensure that all messages sent over SMTP are encrypted and secure. Additionally, the administrator should consider installing SSL certificates on Prism Central to ensure that the messages are being sent securely. Finally, the administrator should consider configuring Prism Central to use Cluster Lockdown, which will help ensure that the messages are only sent to the intended recipients.

The best method to provide access for a user to view real-time performance metrics for all VMs on all clusters across the datacenter is to configure AD authentication create a custom role, assign the user to the role, and apply the role to all clusters and VMs. This method accomplishes this with the least effort and ongoing maintenance because:

• AD authentication allows Nutanix Prism Central to integrate with an existing Active Directory (AD) domain and use AD users and groups for authentication and authorization5. This simplifies user management and avoids creating local users on Prism Central.
• Creating a custom role allows Nutanix Prism Central to define granular permissions for different actions and entities based on specific needs6. This ensures that users only have access to what they need and nothing more.
• Assigning the user to the custom role allows Nutanix Prism Central to grant access rights for that user based on the role definition7. This avoids assigning permissions individually for each user.
• Applying the role to all clusters and VMs allows Nutanix Prism Central to propagate the access rights for that role across all entities in scope8. This ensures that users can view real-time performance metrics for all VMs on all clusters without having to configure each entity separately.

References: 1: Health Dashboard - Prism Element Guide 2: Understanding Native VLANs - Cisco 3: VMs may lose network connectivity if connected to virtual network with … - Nutanix Support & Insights 4: VLAN Configuration - AHV Networking Guide 5: Active Directory Authentication - Prism Central Guide 6: Create Custom Roles - Prism Central Guide 7: Assign Roles - Prism Central Guide 8: Apply Roles - Prism Central Guide

Configure VM-Host affinity for the nodes that meet the application’s GPU requirement. This is because VM-Host affinity allows the administrator to specify which nodes a VM can run on or must not run on1. By creating a VM-Host affinity rule that binds the application VM to the three nodes that have the physical GPU, the administrator can ensure that the VM will always run on a node that meets its requirement, regardless of any HA or migration events. This also allows the other nodes in the cluster to host other VMs without any restrictions.

To periodically send information about cluster efficiency via email to a set of users, the administrator can follow these steps:

• Create a report in Prism Central that contains the relevant information about cluster efficiency.
• Add a schedule to the report to generate and send the report via email to the set of users at a specified frequency.

This will ensure that the users receive regular updates about the cluster efficiency without the need for manual intervention.

Categories are key-value pairs that can be used to tag entities such as VMs, images, networks, and projects in Prism Central. Categories can be used to create dynamic groups of entities based on their attributes, and assign roles and permissions to those groups3. In this case, a category such as OS=Linux can be used to group all Linux VMs and grant access rights to the Linux administration team.

According to the Red Hat Customer Portal, to use RELP with Rsyslog, you need to install the rsyslog-relp package on both the server and the client. If the remote server does not have rsyslog-relp installed, RELP logging will not work as expected.

One of the NICs needs to be configured on the internal VLAN. This is because the VMs that are isolated need to communicate with the firewall VM through a private network, and the firewall VM needs to communicate with the external network through a public network. The internal VLAN is a logical network that can be created and managed by AHV1. If the firewall VM does not have a NIC on the internal VLAN, it will not be able to route traffic between the isolated VMs and the outside world.

The node is automatically re-imaged using the software currently running in the cluster. This is because Nutanix supports a feature called Auto Re-Image that allows adding nodes with different AOS versions to an existing cluster without manual intervention. The Auto Re-Image feature detects the AOS version mismatch and automatically downloads and installs the same AOS version as the cluster on the new node. This ensures that the cluster remains in a consistent state and avoids any compatibility issues.

NTP service needs to be configured to ensure logs, alerts and information is consistent across clusters that are located in different countries. NTP stands for Network Time Protocol and it is used to synchronize the clocks of all the nodes in a cluster1. This helps to maintain accurate timestamps for logs, alerts and other information that are generated by Nutanix clusters1.

According to the Nutanix Prism Central Guide, you can click on any chart in a widget to expand it and view more details about the data elements.

NGT is a software package that enables advanced VM management features provided by Nutanix, such as file-level restore, VM mobility, and application-consistent snapshots12. To use NGT, you need to enable the NGT feature for a VM in the Prism Element web console, mount the NGT installer (ISO disk file) in the VM, and install NGT in the VM1. However, before installing NGT, you need to ensure that the VM can communicate with the NGT-Controller VM service, which runs on the Controller VM (CVM) of each Nutanix node3. The NGT-Controller VM service listens on port 9943 for incoming requests from the guest VMs3. Therefore, you need to enable port 9943 on the ESXi-hosted VM to allow communication with the NGT-Controller VM service.

Nutanix supports two types of deduplication: post-process and inline. Post-process deduplication runs periodically on a schedule and can be enabled on any cluster. Inline deduplication runs in real time before data is written to disk and can be enabled only on all-flash clusters.

Therefore, by checking the type of storage and the type of deduplication, you can determine if you can enable inline deduplication on a storage container or not.

 Nutanix inline deduplication is a feature that reduces the stored size and avoids duplicate data on a storage container1. It is recommended only on some specific scenarios, such as when using Nutanix Files or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads12.