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

According to the Nutanix Prism Central Guide, you can click on any chart in a widget to expand it and view more details about the data elements.

Nutanix Move is a tool that allows you to migrate VMs from different sources to Nutanix AHV with minimal downtime and complexity. Nutanix Move supports migration from Hyper-V to AHV, including VMs configured for UEFI-boot. UEFI stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, which is a standard for the software interface between the operating system and the firmware. UEFI-boot is a mode of booting that uses UEFI instead of BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) to load the operating system. UEFI-boot offers some advantages over BIOS-boot, such as faster boot time, larger disk support, and better security features1.

To migrate a VM configured for UEFI-boot from a Nutanix Hyper-V cluster to AHV, you need to use Nutanix Move and follow these steps2:

Download and deploy the Nutanix Move appliance on the AHV cluster.

Log in to the Nutanix Move web console and add the source Hyper-V environment and the target AHV environment.

Create a migration plan and select the VMs that you want to migrate. You can choose either automatic or manual preparation mode for the migration.

Start the migration plan and monitor the progress. The migration plan will perform data seeding, which is the process of copying the VM data from the source to the target in the background.

When the data seeding is complete, perform a cutover, which is the process of shutting down the source VMs and powering on the target VMs. The cutover will also configure the boot device for the UEFI-boot VMs on AHV.

Verify that the migrated VMs are working as expected on AHV.

References: 1: UEFI Boot - Nutanix Support & Insights 2: Hyper-V to AHV and Hyper-V to Nutanix Clusters on AWS VM Migration - Nutanix Support & Insights

Automated live migration is a feature of Nutanix that allows the cluster to automatically move VMs from one host to another without any downtime, in order to optimize the performance and availability of the cluster. According to the Nutanix documentation1, automated live migration can occur in the following scenarios:

Cluster resource hotspot: When a host or a group of hosts experience high resource utilization, such as CPU, memory, or network, the cluster can automatically migrate some VMs to other hosts with lower utilization, in order to balance the load and avoid performance degradation.

AOS upgrade: When upgrading the Nutanix software (AOS), the cluster can automatically migrate the VMs from the host that is being upgraded to another host in the same availability zone, in order to maintain the VM availability and minimize the impact of the upgrade process.

AHV host maintenance mode: When putting an AHV host into maintenance mode, the cluster can automatically migrate all the VMs from that host to another host in the same availability zone, in order to prepare the host for maintenance operations such as hardware replacement or firmware update.

The issue described pertains to the inability to ping the IPMI IPs after moving the IPMI network links to the actual switches with specific VLAN configurations. The two changes that the administrator needs to make are:

A. SSH to AHV and set the VLAN ID using IPMI Tool: Since all VLANs are tagged in the new network configuration, the IPMI network interface needs to be aware of the VLAN it’s supposed to communicate on. This can be achieved by setting the VLAN ID using the IPMI Tool on the AHV.

C. SSH to AHV and change the IP address using IPMI tool: If the IPMI IP addresses were initially set in a different subnet that is not routable in the new network configuration, the administrator would need to change the IPMI IP addresses to match the new network configuration. This can be done by SSHing to the AHV and using the IPMI Tool to change the IP address.

NGT is a software package that enables advanced VM management features provided by Nutanix, such as file-level restore, VM mobility, and application-consistent snapshots12. To use NGT, you need to enable the NGT feature for a VM in the Prism Element web console, mount the NGT installer (ISO disk file) in the VM, and install NGT in the VM1. However, before installing NGT, you need to ensure that the VM can communicate with the NGT-Controller VM service, which runs on the Controller VM (CVM) of each Nutanix node3. The NGT-Controller VM service listens on port 9943 for incoming requests from the guest VMs3. Therefore, you need to enable port 9943 on the ESXi-hosted VM to allow communication with the NGT-Controller VM service.

According to the web search results, one of the best practices for Nutanix AHV networking is to create a second bridge on each host and assign the 1GbE interfaces to it3. This way, the customer can use both 10GbE and 1GbE interfaces for VM traffic, and also benefit from network isolation and redundancy. 

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details/?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v51:wc-block-services-c.html

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Prism-Central-Guide-vpc_2023_3:mul-cluster-storage-policy-pc-c.html

A bully VM is a VM that consumes too many resources and causes other VMs to starve. A bully VM can affect the performance and availability of other VMs on the same host or cluster by hogging CPU, memory, disk, or network resources. A bully VM can be identified by using the VM Profile feature in Prism Central2. The VM Profile feature analyzes the resource utilization of each VM and assigns it a profile based on its efficiency and impact on other VMs. The profiles are as follows3:

Efficient: The VM is well-provisioned and has optimal resource utilization.

Over-provisioned: The VM has more resources than it needs and has low resource utilization.

Constrained: The VM has less resources than it needs and has high resource utilization.

Inactive: The VM has no resource utilization and is idle or powered off.

Bully: The VM has high resource utilization and causes contention for other VMs.

To identify a bully VM, the administrator can use Prism Central to view the VM Profile dashboard and filter by profile type. The dashboard shows the number of VMs in each profile type, as well as their resource consumption and efficiency score. The administrator can also drill down into each VM to see its detailed metrics and recommendations for optimization.