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

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.

Flow Networking is a feature that enables software-defined networking for AHV clusters. It allows users to create and manage virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, and network services such as NAT, DHCP, routing, and VPN. Flow Networking also supports service insertion and chaining, which enables integration with third-party network functions such as firewalls and load balancers. Flow Networking is built on top of the microservices infrastructure (MSP) in Prism Central, which provides the platform for running various Nutanix services such as Calm, Karbon, and Objects. Therefore, to enable Flow Networking, the MSP must be enabled first on Prism Central1. The MSP can be enabled from the Prism Central settings page or from the command line interface (CLI) of the Prism Central VM2. Enabling the MSP will also enable Flow Microsegmentation, which is another feature that provides network security and visibility for AHV clusters.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights website1, you can configure alert emails through Prism Central by enabling or disabling customer email notification for each alert. You can also modify or create custom alert policies for different entities and clusters23.

Zombie VMs and overprovisioned VMs are two types of inefficient VMs that can waste resources and increase costs in a Nutanix environment. Zombie VMs are VMs that are powered on but have no activity or utilization for a long period of time. Overprovisioned VMs are VMs that have more resources allocated than they actually need or use. Both types of VMs can be identified by adding predefined views to a report in Prism Central.

A predefined view is a template that defines what data is displayed and how that data is represented in a report. Prism Central provides several predefined views for different purposes, such as capacity planning, performance analysis, anomaly detection, and efficiency optimization. To add a predefined view to a report, go to Operations > Reports > New Report and select the desired view from the list1.

The Zombie VMs List view shows the list of zombie VMs in the environment based on the CPU usage, memory usage, disk IOPS, and network throughput metrics. The view also shows the amount of resources wasted by these VMs and the potential savings that can be achieved by deleting or resizing them2.

The Overprovisioned VMs List view shows the list of overprovisioned VMs in the environment based on the CPU usage, memory usage, disk IOPS, and network throughput metrics. The view also shows the amount of resources wasted by these VMs and the potential savings that can be achieved by resizing them3.

By adding these two views to a report, an administrator can identify inefficient VMs and take appropriate actions to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs.

References: 1: Reports Management - Prism Central Guide 2: Zombie VMs List - Prism Central Guide 3: Overprovisioned VMs List - Prism Central Guide

According to the web search results, three storage optimizations that should be set on a dedicated storage container for a VDI solution with persistent desktops are compression, deduplication and erasure coding. Compression is a technique that reduces the size of data by removing redundant information. Deduplication is a technique that eliminates duplicate copies of data blocks and stores only unique blocks. Erasure coding is a technique that increases usable capacity by reducing the replication factor of data blocks and using parity information instead7. These three optimizations can improve performance and save storage space for VDI workloads, especially during a node failure event when data needs to be rebuilt from parity information8. The administrator can enable these optimizations by using Prism Element web console or ncli command-line interface9.

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.

https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/differences-between-prism-element-prism-central-and-prism-pro-37137

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.

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.

Prism Central is a multi-cluster manager that provides a single, centralized management interface for Nutanix environments1. Prism Central can be deployed in different configuration scenarios, depending on the network and security requirements of the environment. Some of the valid scenarios are:

Environments use Network Address Translation (NAT): NAT is a method of mapping one IP address space to another by modifying network address information in IP datagram packet headers while they are in transit across a traffic routing device2. NAT can be used to enable communication between Prism Central and Prism Elements that are in different networks or subnets3. For example, Prism Central can be deployed in a public cloud and use NAT to access Prism Elements that are in a private data center3.

Prism Elements and Prism Central are in different subnets: A subnet is a logical subdivision of an IP network that allows multiple networks to share a single physical network4. Prism Elements and Prism Central can be in different subnets as long as they can communicate with each other through routing or NAT3. For example, Prism Central can be deployed in a management subnet and access Prism Elements that are in different application subnets3.

Environments do not have Internet access: Internet access is not required for the deployment of Prism Central, as long as the environment meets the prerequisites and considerations for installing or upgrading Prism Central. For example, Prism Central can be deployed in a dark site, which is an environment that does not have Internet access or has restricted Internet access. In this case, the administrator needs to manually enable microservices infrastructure and download the required software packages from another source.