NCSE-Core Reviews Questions

Customer Requirement:

Failover capability to a secondary datacenter with an RPO and RTO of no more than 15 minutes.

Round trip latency between sites can reach up to 6ms.

Nutanix Feature:

NearSync: This feature provides a low RPO/RTO disaster recovery solution with support for low-latency inter-site communication.

Explanation:

NearSyncallows for frequent asynchronous replication with very low RPOs (as low as 1 minute) and ensures rapid recovery times.

It is designed to handle round trip latencies up to 6ms, making it suitable for the customer’s inter-site latency requirements.

Outcome:

NearSync will enable the customer to meet their stringent RPO and RTO requirements, ensuring that VMs can be powered on in the secondary datacenter quickly in the event of a primary datacenter failure.

References: For further details on NearSync capabilities and configuration, refer to Nutanix documentation on disaster recovery and NearSync features.

Nutanix X-Ray is the tool packaged as a VM that uses realistic workloads paired with real-world test scenarios for HCI environments. It is designed to benchmark performance during typical workflows and failure events. X-Ray provides comprehensive testing capabilities, simulating various conditions and workloads to help evaluate the performance and resilience of the Nutanix infrastructure.

References:

Nutanix Bible

To improve the performance of VDI desktops in an 8-node Nutanix VDI environment, consider the following key performance indicators:

Cluster Memory Utilization: 80%- This high level of memory utilization suggests that the cluster is experiencing memory pressure. Insufficient memory can lead to increased swap activity, affecting the overall performance of the VDI environment.

Cluster SSD Utilization: 70%- This level of SSD utilization indicates that storage performance is still within acceptable limits. Therefore, adding more SSD storage may not provide a significant performance boost.

Average VM CPU Wait Time: 11%- A high CPU wait time can be indicative of CPU contention, but in this scenario, it is more likely secondary to memory constraints.

CVM CPU Utilization: 75%- CVM utilization is moderately high, but not at critical levels. This suggests that the CVMs are performing their management functions adequately.

Given these conditions, adding more memory to the nodes will help reduce memory pressure, improve overall system performance, and reduce CPU wait time as VMs will have enough memory to operate efficiently without excessive swapping.

References:

Nutanix Bible, Performance Optimization section​​.

Nutanix-Community-Edition-Getting-Started, Memory and Performance tuning​​.

To increase availability by enabling rack awareness in a current configuration with a single RF2 cluster consisting of 7 identical NX-3170 1U nodes, the systems engineer should:

Add Nodes: Increase the node count to enhance redundancy.

Add 2 additional NX-3170 1U nodesto bring the total to 9 nodes. This ensures there are enough nodes to distribute across multiple racks while maintaining the RF2 configuration.

Distribute Nodes Across Racks:

Distribute nodes across 2 separate racksto achieve rack awareness. This means placing nodes in such a way that the failure of a single rack does not impact the availability of the entire cluster.

By following these steps, the cluster will be resilient to a single rack failure, enhancing the overall availability.

References:

Nutanix documentation on RF2 configurations and rack awareness.

Best practices for node and rack distribution to ensure high availability.