NCSE-Core Exam Dumps - Nutanix SE Academy Questions and Answers

CVM (Controller VM) Autopathing allows workloads to continue running on the host during an AOS (Acropolis Operating System) upgrade. This feature ensures that the I/O operations are redirected to other healthy CVMs in the cluster if the local CVM is temporarily unavailable during the upgrade process. This seamless redirection ensures that there is no disruption to the workloads, maintaining continuous operations and high availability during upgrades.

References:

Nutanix Bible​

Understanding Network Planning for POC:

A Proof of Concept (POC) requires meticulous planning, especially concerning network configurations. This ensures seamless integration and evaluation within the customer's existing infrastructure.

VLAN Tags:

Explanation: VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) tags are crucial for segregating network traffic, ensuring that the different types of traffic (management, storage, VM traffic) do not interfere with each other.

B. Data Locality:

Nutanix's data locality feature ensures that data is always written and read from the local storage of the node where the VM is running. This minimizes latency and provides consistent performance, which addresses the unpredictable storage performance and latency spikes the prospect is experiencing.

By keeping data local to the VM, Nutanix reduces the dependency on the network for storage operations, resulting in improved and predictable performance, especially during peak utilization.

C. ABS (Acropolis Block Services):

Nutanix ABS (Acropolis Block Services) provides the ability to use Nutanix storage with external servers while leveraging the benefits of Nutanix’s distributed storage fabric.

This feature is particularly beneficial for Oracle environments where the organization has invested significantly in servers to save on licensing costs. ABS allows these existing servers to utilize Nutanix's all-flash storage without moving workloads entirely onto Nutanix nodes.

ABS can provide high performance and low latency storage which is critical for Oracle databases and helps address the customer's preference for all-flash arrays.

B. Review budgetary pricing:

The Sizer BOM (Bill of Materials) provides a breakdown of the components and their costs, allowing the SE to review budgetary pricing and ensure the solution fits within the prospect’s financial constraints.

C. Review workload sizing details:

The Sizer BOM includes detailed workload sizing information, which helps the SE verify that the proposed solution meets the performance and capacity requirements for the SQL Server workload running on Cisco C240 M4 servers.

References:

Nutanix Sizer tool documentation explains how to use the BOM for reviewing pricing and workload sizing details.

For highly active SQL workloads that write I/Os in 2 MB chunks to a vDisk, compression is the most suitable storage optimization technology. Compression works well with larger I/O sizes and can significantly reduce the storage footprint, providing better capacity optimization. This approach ensures that the large chunks of data are compressed efficiently, maximizing storage utilization and performance​​.

A. Data Locality:

Nutanix's data locality feature ensures that data is kept close to the VM that uses it, typically on the same node. This reduces latency and improves performance by minimizing the need for data to travel over the network.

This feature is crucial in a hybrid configuration as it ensures that frequently accessed data remains on the faster SSD tier, thus enhancing overall performance.

E. Automatic Data Tiering:

Nutanix employs automatic data tiering to move data between different types of storage (e.g., SSD and HDD) based on usage patterns. Frequently accessed data is kept on faster SSDs, while less frequently accessed data is moved to HDDs.

This ensures optimal performance by leveraging the speed of SSDs for active data while utilizing the capacity of HDDs for less critical data, thereby addressing the storage administrator's concerns about performance in a hybrid setup.

References:

The Nutanix Bible and other technical documentation explain these features in detail, emphasizing how they contribute to high performance and efficient storage management in Nutanix clusters.

Analyze the CPU utilization data:

Historical CPU utilization data indicates that peak CPU utilization never exceeds 50% on either physical host.

This implies that the existing physical CPUs are underutilized.

Calculate vCPU

ratio:

Given that peak utilization is only 50%, a conservative approach would be to use a lower vCPU to pCore ratio to avoid overcommitment and ensure performance.

Recommended ratio:

A 2:1 vCPU to pCore ratio is appropriate in this scenario to ensure that there is ample CPU capacity and to avoid potential performance bottlenecks.

References:

Nutanix Sizer tool recommendations and best practices for CPU allocation in virtualized environments.

Zookeeper in Nutanix is responsible for distributing metadata to ensure availability in case of node or block failure. Metadata includes important information about the state and configuration of the cluster, which is crucial for maintaining cluster operations and consistency.

References:

Nutanix Bible

The Nutanix Collector provides performance data over the previous 7 days. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of the environment's performance trends and helps in making informed sizing and configuration decisions.

Data Collection:

Nutanix Collector gathers data points related to CPU, memory, storage, and network usage over a 7-day period.

Analysis Period:

A 7-day data collection period ensures that the analysis captures the variability and peak usage patterns, providing a reliable basis for infrastructure planning.

Usage:

This period is user-friendly and sufficient to identify performance bottlenecks, resource utilization patterns, and to validate that the proposed solution will meet the customer’s requirements.

References:

Nutanix Collector documentation and usage guidelines.

Best practices for performance monitoring and analysis.