NCA-6.5 Nutanix Certified Associate (NCA) v6.5 exam Question and Answers

According to Nutanix Support Best Practices, P3 cases are designated for issues that have a moderate business impact or affect non-production systems. P3 cases are intended for issues that are important but not critical, and the issue can be deferred while continuing with normal business operations. Examples of P3 cases include software defects, minor configuration issues, or minor hardware problems.

The oplog is a critical component of the Nutanix distributed storage fabric and can be impacted by high CPU Ready time. When the CPU Ready time is high, there can be delays in writing data to the oplog, resulting in slower overall cluster performance. Additionally, high CPU Ready time can also lead to increased write amplification, further reducing I/O performance.

In Active-backup mode, one network interface is active while the other is in standby mode. If the active interface fails, the standby interface takes over, providing seamless failover without any disruption to user VMs. In this case, since the cluster has two 10 GbE ports on each node, and only one link has failed, the user VMs will continue to operate normally using the second link.

The type of relationship that a VM Affinity policy defines is VM to Host. A VM Affinity policy is used to specify which host a virtual machine should be placed on. This can be used to ensure that certain VMs are always running on the same host for performance or availability reasons. Additionally, VM Affinity policies can also be used to ensure that VMs are spread across multiple hosts for better load balancing.

To maintain high availability in the case of a node failure in a two-node cluster, a Witness VM is required. Therefore, the correct answer is A. The Witness VM acts as a tie-breaker and arbitrator in the event of a split-brain scenario, where both nodes lose connectivity to each other, to ensure that only one node continues to operate and serve workloads. It is also recommended to use a high-performance network to minimize network latency between the two nodes and the Witness VM.

Nutanix Volumes uses a Filesystem Whitelist to control which external hosts can access the iSCSI block devices allocated to them. If the external host IP address is not in the Filesystem Whitelist, it will not be able to discover or connect to the Nutanix-hosted iSCSI block device. Jumbo frames, external client access, and network segmentation are not required for Nutanix Volumes to work. References: https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/datasheets/ds-nutanix-acropolis-block-services.pdf (page 4) https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=BP-2049-Nutanix-Volumes:BP-2049-Nutanix-Volumes (page 7)

In a Nutanix environment, the product or feature most suitable for deploying a Microsoft SQL cluster is Nutanix Objects. Nutanix Objects is a S3-compatible object storage solution that provides a highly scalable and durable storage for unstructured data. It is built on top of the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) and provides a high-performance, scalable, and highly available storage solution.

One of the key features of Nutanix Objects is its ability to support Microsoft SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AAG) on S3 object storage. This allows you to deploy a highly available SQL cluster on Nutanix, with the ability to failover SQL services to a different node in the event of a failure, and provide high availability and disaster recovery for SQL databases.

Nutanix supports high availability (HA) for VMs by automatically restarting them on other nodes in the cluster in case of a node failure. The cluster CPU and memory utilization will increase temporarily until the failed node is recovered, but there will be no user impact. References: https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/misc/ebg-nca-6-5.pdf (page 28)

The Redfish Protocol and Lifecycle Manager (LCM) provide the biggest benefit of allowing BMC and BIOS updates to be done twice as quickly as before. This is because Redfish and LCM allow for updates to be done in parallel, rather than serially, which reduces the amount of time it takes for an update to be completed. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-redfish-lcm-c.html

To upgrade the LCM framework to the latest version, the administrator must go to the Settings page of the Prism Central UI, and then select the Upgrade Software option. This will show the available versions of the LCM framework, and allow the administrator to select the desired version and upgrade. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-lcm-upgrade-c.html

Enabling Flash Mode will set the storage tier preference to SSD, meaning that data will be stored on the high-performance SSD storage tier. Flash Mode is designed to speed up the performance of applications by ensuring that the most frequently used data is stored on the faster storage tier. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-flash-mode-c.html

Check the below.

Labels allow administrators to group related objects, such as VMs, and then apply policies to those labels, rather than having to manually apply the policy to each individual VM. This is the most efficient way for an administrator to apply a security policy to dozens of VMs. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-sec-category-label-c.html

To assure system stability and support for critical applications running on a Nutanix cluster, the administrator can adhere to the LTS (Long Term Support) release cycle. LTS releases provide stability and long-term support, with a focus on maintenance and bug fixes rather than new features. This can help ensure that the system remains stable and supported during the annual maintenance window 

Nutanix Objects is a storage service that can store petabytes of unstructured data and supports S3 APIs. It is a distributed object store that provides an easy-to-use interface for storing and managing objects and data. It also provides advanced features such as versioning, replication, encryption, and access control. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-objects-c.html