Free Practice Questions for Nutanix NCSE-Core Exam

For running a single instance Oracle Database VM on AHV that is driving over 250,000 IOPS, the AOS feature that should be positioned to deliver the highest level of performance is Data Locality.

Data Locality Overview:

Data Locality ensures that data is kept local to the node where the VM is running. This minimizes the latency involved in data access because it avoids traversing the network to fetch data from remote nodes.

Performance Benefits:

By keeping the data local to the node, it leverages the local SSDs and RAM for the highest possible performance.

This is crucial for high IOPS workloads such as an Oracle Database VM, where low latency and high throughput are essential.

Implementation:

Nutanix AOS automatically manages data locality, ensuring that read and write operations are performed on the local storage as much as possible.

References:

Nutanix Bible on Data Locality.

Nutanix Documentation on Performance Optimization.

To provide users with the ability to restore individual files from snapshots in an AHV environment, the minimum level of licensing required is the "Pro" tier. The Pro tier includes advanced data protection features such as file-level recovery from snapshots, which allows users to restore individual files without needing to restore entire VMs or volumes.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Problem Analysis:

The prospect experiences unplanned downtime due to hardware failures.

Notifications from their SNMP-based monitoring solution have been ignored due to communication issues.

Nutanix Pulse:

Pulse provides proactive support and monitoring for Nutanix clusters.

It automatically sends cluster health and performance data to Nutanix support, enabling quick issue resolution.

This feature can ensure critical alerts and notifications are not missed, improving overall system reliability.

Conclusion:

Highlighting Pulse helps address the key pain points of unplanned downtime and missed notifications, ensuring better system management and support.

References:

Nutanix Pulse feature documentation.

Nutanix support and monitoring best practices.

When discussing Nutanix differentiators with a prospect considering vSAN for their HCI initiative, especially for read-intensive workloads with over 1PB of archival data, the following features should be highlighted:

Compression on Hybrid Nodes:

Nutanix provides efficient data compression on hybrid nodes, significantly reducing the storage footprint and saving costs. This is particularly beneficial for archival data, which can be highly compressible, thus maximizing storage efficiency and reducing the total cost of ownership.

Data Locality:

Nutanix's data locality feature ensures that data is kept local to the node where the VM is running. This reduces latency and enhances performance, particularly for read-intensive workloads, by minimizing the need for data to travel across the network.

References:

Nutanix Bible ​

When setting up Acropolis File Service (AFS) for the first time on a Nutanix cluster, the system creates three file services VMs by default. These VMs are distributed across different nodes in the cluster to ensure high availability and load balancing of the file services.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Nutanix Community Edition Getting Started Guide​

For a prospect interested in evaluating Nutanix at no cost for a few months using existing test hardware:

Requirement Analysis:

The prospect wants a free evaluation.

They intend to use their existing hardware.

Their focus is on experiencing platform management rather than performance.

Feature Analysis:

Nutanix NX POC: Provides a proof of concept using Nutanix hardware, which might not align with the prospect's desire to use existing hardware.

Nutanix Community Edition (CE): A free, fully functional version of Nutanix AOS that can be installed on existing hardware. It is intended for non-production use and allows users to experience the management features of Nutanix.

Nutanix Go: A subscription-based service providing Nutanix hardware and software, not suitable for a no-cost evaluation.

Nutanix Test Drive: Offers a short-term, hands-on experience in a hosted environment, but does not allow for an extended evaluation using the prospect's hardware.

Conclusion: Nutanix Community Edition is the best option for the prospect as it allows a no-cost, extended evaluation using their existing hardware and focuses on platform management capabilities.

References:

Nutanix Community Edition documentation​

Understanding Citrix Desktop Creation:

Citrix desktop creation involves provisioning and managing virtual desktops, which is critical for deploying VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) environments.

Capabilities Supported on Nutanix AHV:

Provisioning Service (PVS):

Explanation: Citrix Provisioning Services streamlines desktop and server management by provisioning desktops from a single shared image.

Support on AHV: Nutanix AHV supports Citrix PVS for efficient desktop creation and management.

When an HA event causes a SQL virtual machine to restart on a different node, Nutanix's data locality feature ensures that the active VM data is localized to the new node. This means that the data associated with the VM will be migrated to the storage local to the new node, ensuring optimal performance by reducing the need for cross-node data access.

References:

Nutanix Bible​

To maintain optimal metadata balance and data availability, and to meet the requirements for storage capacity, memory, and CPU cores, the recommended configuration should align closely with the existing node configurations while providing the necessary resources.

A. 2x NX-3060-G5 - 2x E5-2620v4 processors, 128GB RAM, 2x 960GB SSDs, 4x 2TB HDDs:

Adding two additional NX-3060-G5 nodes with the same specifications as the existing nodes ensures uniformity and maintains metadata balance and data availability.

This configuration provides enough additional storage capacity, memory, and CPU cores to accommodate the new workloads.

References:

Nutanix documentation on cluster expansion and the importance of maintaining uniform node configurations for optimal performance and reliability.

C. When deploying an Oracle RAC database:

Shadow clones should be explicitly disabled when deploying an Oracle RAC database. Oracle RAC requires highly consistent and low-latency storage access, and enabling shadow clones can introduce additional latency and potential inconsistencies that are unsuitable for such databases.

Shadow clones are designed to enhance performance for read-heavy workloads by caching frequently accessed data locally. However, Oracle RAC’s stringent requirements for data consistency and latency make this feature inappropriate for its deployment.