Nutanix NCP-MCI-6.5 Practice Questions

Explanation: According to section 5 of the exam blueprint guide1, one of the topics covered is live migration. Live migration is the process of moving a running VM from one host to another without any downtime or interruption of service. To perform live migration, there are some prerequisites that must be met, such as:

• All AHV hosts have IP addresses in the same subnet
• All VMs are configured for the same VLAN
• The source and destination hosts have enough resources to accommodate the VM
• The VM does not have any PCI devices attached

Explanation: Prism Element is a graphical user interface that allows you to manage Nutanix clusters1. You can use Prism Element charts to understand Nutanix cluster workloads and troubleshoot performance related issues2.
Memory optimized virtual machine sizes offer the best performance for SQL Server workloads on Azure VMs. Adding more RAM to the user VM can help reduce paging and improve query execution times.
SQL Server performance can be affected by disk latency and throughput. By creating separate virtual disks for data and logs, you can spread activity across multiple spindles and reduce disk contention.

Explanation: An agent VM is a special type of VM that is used for running services or applications that are not affected by high availability (HA) events or host maintenance. An agent VM is never migrated to any other host in the cluster. If an HA event occurs or the host is put in maintenance mode, agent VMs are powered off and are powered on on the same host once that host returns to a normal state. This behavior is different from regular VMs, which are migrated to another host in the cluster if possible, or restarted on the same host if not possible1.
Therefore, during an AHV upgrade, an administrator may find that a critical VM was powered off rather than migrated to another host if the VM was marked as an agent VM. This can be done either from the Prism web console by selecting the Use this VM as an agent VM option in the Update VM dialog box, or from the aCLI by using the vm.create or vm.update commands with the agent_vm=true parameter2. To avoid this situation, the administrator should ensure that any critical VMs are not marked as agent VMs before starting the AHV upgrade.

Explanation: 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.

Explanation: 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.

Explanation: 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.