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

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.

A. This statement is incorrect because there is no static threshold set to trigger a critical alert at 6000 MB. The graph shows a peak that goes above 6000 MB, but the alert configuration below does not specify a static threshold at this value.

B. This is the correct statement. The configuration under "Behavioral Anomaly" is set to alert every time there is an anomaly, with a critical level alert set to trigger when the I/O working set size is between 0 MB and 4000 MB. The graph illustrates that the anomalies (highlighted in pink) occur when the working set size exceeds the normal range (blue band). Therefore, any anomaly detected above 4000 MB would trigger a critical alert.

C. This statement is incorrect because there is no indication that a warning alert is configured to trigger after 3 anomalies. The exhibit does not show any configuration that specifies an alert based on the number of anomalies.

D. This statement is incorrect as there's no indication that a warning alert will be triggered based on the I/O working set size exceeding the blue band. The alert settings are configured to ignore anomalies below 4000 MB and to trigger a critical alert for anomalies above this threshold.

The settings displayed in the exhibit are typically part of Nutanix's Prism infrastructure management platform, which can set various thresholds for performance metrics and trigger alerts based on those thresholds. The behavior is defined in the Prism documentation where the alert configuration is outlined.

According to the web search results, the most efficient action an administrator should take to ensure a supported state when adding a node with a higher AOS release to an existing cluster is to perform a standalone reimage of the new node and then add it to the cluster1. This way, the new node will have the same AOS version as the existing nodes, and there will be no compatibility issues or downtime. Therefore, option C is correct, while options A, B, and D are not.

The correct answer is D. Fewer than 30 I/Os and less than 1000 bytes per day of network traffic for the past 21 days.

A zombie VM is a type of inactive VM that is powered on but does very little activity. A zombie VM wastes host resources such as CPU, memory, disk, and network that could be used by other VMs. A zombie VM can be identified by using the VM Profile feature in Prism Central. 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 follows1:

• 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.

A zombie VM is a subtype of an inactive VM that meets the following criteria2:

• The VM is powered on for the past 21 days.
• The VM does fewer than 30 read or write I/Os (total) per day for the past 21 days.
• The VM receives or transfers fewer than 1000 bytes per day of network traffic for the past 21 days.

To identify a zombie 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.

According to section 4 of the exam blueprint guide1, one of the topics covered is AHV networking components and configuration settings. One of these components is Open vSwitch (OVS), which is a software switch that provides network connectivity between VMs and physical networks. OVS has two types of ports:

• Uplink ports: These are physical ports that connect to external networks or switches.
• Internal ports: These are virtual ports that connect to VMs or other internal networks.

To view the uplink state of all AHV nodes in the cluster, an administrator can use the manage_ovs command with the show_uplinks option. This command displays information such as port name, link state, speed, duplex mode, MTU size, bond mode, and bond status. However, this command only works on a single node. To run the command on all nodes in the cluster, an administrator can use the allssh command, which executes a command on all CVMs in parallel. Therefore, the correct command is:

allssh manage_ovs show_uplinks

Nutanix supports two types of deduplication: post-process and inline. Post-process deduplication runs periodically on a schedule and can be enabled on any cluster. Inline deduplication runs in real time before data is written to disk and can be enabled only on all-flash clusters.

Therefore, by checking the type of storage and the type of deduplication, you can determine if you can enable inline deduplication on a storage container or not.

 Nutanix inline deduplication is a feature that reduces the stored size and avoids duplicate data on a storage container1. It is recommended only on some specific scenarios, such as when using Nutanix Files or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads12.

inline compression is a technique that compresses all incoming write I/O operations over 4 KB inline in the persistent write buffer (oplog)23. This approach enables you to use oplog capacity more efficiently and helps drive sustained performance2. From AOS 5.18 onward, inline compression (compression delay=0) is enabled by default for all new containers24.

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=TN-2032-Data-Efficiency:TN-2032-Data-Efficiency

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result3, advertised capacity is an advanced container setting that allows the administrator to reserve an advertised storage space for a storage container. An advertised capacity setting gives the hypervisor a maximum storage size that the storage container can use. This setting can be any arbitrary value greater than or equal to the resiliency required. The hypervisor ensures that the storage container storage doesn’t go beyond the advertised capacity. If the administrator wants a container to be displayed and limited to 1TB in the hypervisor, they should set the advertised capacity to 1TB.

These are the three steps that the administrator must take to increase throughput to the host. According to the network diagram, the host has two 10Gb interfaces and two 1Gb interfaces in the default bond, but only one of the 10Gb interfaces is connected to a switch. The other 10Gb interface is disconnected and has a red “X” on it. The two 1Gb interfaces are also disconnected and have dotted lines. This means that the host is using only one 10Gb interface for all its network traffic, which limits its maximum bandwidth to 10 Gbps.

To increase the throughput, the administrator should connect both 10Gb interfaces to the physical switch, preferably to different switches for redundancy and high availability. This will allow the host to use both 10Gb interfaces for network traffic, which can increase its maximum bandwidth to 20 Gbps. However, this also requires changing the bond mode from active-backup to balance-slb or balance-tcp, which are load balancing modes that distribute network traffic across multiple interfaces based on source MAC address or TCP session1. The default bond mode of active-backup only uses one interface at a time and switches to another interface only when the active one fails2.

Finally, the administrator should remove any 1Gb interfaces still connected from the default bond, as they are not needed and may cause performance issues or conflicts with the load balancing modes. The 1Gb interfaces can be used for other purposes, such as management or backup networks, by creating separate bonds or bridges for them3. Alternatively, they can be left disconnected if they are not required.

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. 

A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a specialized hardware device that can accelerate graphics rendering and computation for applications that use APIs such as DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA, and OpenCL. A GPU can also offload the CPU from encoding and decoding tasks for remote display protocols such as Frame Remote Desktop Protocol (FRP). A VM can use a GPU either by directly accessing a physical GPU (pGPU) on the host or by using a virtual GPU (vGPU) that shares a pGPU with other VMs. A user running a computer aided design (CAD) application may benefit from using a GPU or a vGPU to improve the performance and responsiveness of the application, especially when moving windows or rendering images. However, if the GPU or vGPU is not properly configured or provisioned, the user may experience slow response time within the VM. Therefore, to diagnose the problem, the administrator should monitor the GPU Usage metric for the VM. The GPU Usage metric shows the percentage of GPU resources that are consumed by the VM over time3. The administrator can use Prism Central to view the GPU Usage metric for each VM in a chart or a widget4. The administrator can also use Prism Central to view other metrics related to GPU performance, such as GPU Memory Usage, GPU Encoder Usage, and GPU Decoder Usage3. By analyzing these metrics, the administrator can determine if the VM is using the GPU efficiently and optimally, or if it needs more or less GPU resources.

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.

According to the Nutanix Prism Element Guide, Prism Element uses a single SSL certificate on a Nutanix cluster. The certificate is used to secure the communication between the web browser and the Prism web console. The certificate is also used to authenticate the cluster to external services, such as Active Directory, SMTP, and SNMP. The certificate can be either self-signed or signed by a trusted certificate authority (CA). The certificate can be replaced or renewed through the Prism web console or the ncli command-line interface.

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.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result3, shadow clones are vDisk copies that are created by the cluster when a vDisk is read by multiple VMs. Shadow clones are immutable copies of a vDisk that are stored in different nodes in the cluster, and are used to improve read performance and reduce network traffic. Shadow clones are automatically created and deleted by the cluster, based on the demand and availability of resources.

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details/?targetId=Web_Console_Guide-Prism_v4_7:lic_licensing_managing_c.html

Reclaiming Licenses (Including License Renewal)

You can reclaim and optionally re-apply licenses for nodes in your clusters:

• You must reclaim licenses when you plan to destroy a cluster. First reclaim the licenses, then destroy the cluster. You do not need to reclaim Starter licenses. These licenses are automatically applied whenever you create a cluster, including after you have destroyed a cluster.
• Return licenses to your inventory when you remove one or more nodes from a cluster. Also, if you move nodes from one cluster to another, first reclaim the licenses, move the nodes, then re-apply the licenses.
• You can reclaim licenses for nodes in your clusters in cases where you want to make modifications or downgrade licenses. For example, applying an Ultimate license to all nodes in a cluster where some nodes are currently licensed as Pro and some nodes are licensed as Ultimate. You might also want to transition nodes from Ultimate to Pro licensing.
• You must reclaim licenses when you renew licenses. First reclaim the expired licenses, then apply new licenses.

VirtIO drivers are device drivers that are specifically designed for virtualized environments. They allow the guest operating system to communicate directly with the underlying hardware, bypassing the emulation layer. This improves the performance and efficiency of the virtual machines. VirtIO drivers are supported by various hypervisors, including Nutanix AHV1.

Nutanix AHV uses SCSI disks for VMs by default. However, Windows does not have native support for SCSI disks and requires VirtIO drivers to recognize them. Therefore, if an administrator is installing Windows 2019 on a new VM on an AHV cluster, they need to install the VirtIO drivers before selecting the destination disk for the installation. Otherwise, they will not see any drives listed for the install2.

To install the VirtIO drivers during Windows installation, the administrator can use one of the following methods3:

• Use a VirtIO ISO image that contains the driver files. The administrator can download the VirtIO ISO image from the Nutanix support portal and upload it to the AHV image service. Then, they can attach the VirtIO ISO image to the VM as a CD-ROM device and load the driver from it during Windows installation.
• Use a Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) ISO image that contains the driver files and other tools. The administrator can download the NGT ISO image from Prism Element or Prism Central and attach it to the VM as a CD-ROM device. Then, they can load the driver from it during Windows installation.
• Use a floppy disk image that contains only the driver files. The administrator can create a floppy disk image using tools such as WinImage or WinRAR and upload it to the AHV image service. Then, they can attach the floppy disk image to the VM as a floppy device and load the driver from it during Windows installation.

This is because Nutanix uses a distributed storage fabric (DSF) that replicates data across multiple nodes and drives to ensure data resiliency. When a drive fails, the cluster detects the failure and initiates a data rebuild process to restore the replication factor (RF) of the affected containers. The data rebuild process does not affect the availability or performance of the VMs, as they can still access their data from other replicas on other nodes or drives. Therefore, there is no need to wait for 60 minutes, use a shared volume group, or trigger an HA event.

Fault tolerance (FT) is the ability of a cluster to withstand node failures and maintain data availability. FT is determined by the replication factor (RF) of the data, which is the number of copies of each data block stored on different nodes. FT = RF - 1, meaning that the cluster can tolerate as many node failures as one less than the RF. Block awareness is a feature that enhances fault tolerance by ensuring that data copies are distributed across different blocks, which are groups of nodes that share a power source and network switch. Block awareness requires a minimum of three blocks and a minimum of six nodes in the cluster.

In this scenario, the administrator has been asked to enable block awareness and increase the fault tolerance to FT2 on a Nutanix AHV cluster with the following configuration: Four blocks, One node per block. The administrator will not be able to accomplish these tasks because:

• To enable block awareness, the cluster needs at least six nodes, but it only has four nodes.
• To increase the fault tolerance to FT2, the cluster needs at least five nodes per RF3 or seven nodes per RF4, but it only has four nodes.

Therefore, the administrator will need to add more nodes to the cluster before enabling block awareness and increasing the fault tolerance to FT2.

When a VM is connected to a Nutanix managed network, the IP address is assigned when the VM is powered on. A Nutanix managed network is a network that is created and managed by Prism Central using IP address management (IPAM). IPAM allows Prism Central to automatically assign IP addresses to VMs from a pool of available addresses in a subnet. IPAM also tracks the IP address usage and availability across clusters and networks4.

When a VM is connected to a Nutanix managed network, the administrator can choose one of the following assignment types for the IP address:

• Assign Static IP: This option allows the administrator to manually specify a static IP address for the VM from the subnet range. The IP address will not change unless the administrator changes it.
• Assign with DHCP: This option allows Prism Central to dynamically assign an IP address for the VM from the subnet range using DHCP. The IP address may change depending on the DHCP lease time and availability.
• No Private IP: This option allows the administrator to skip assigning an IP address for the VM. This option is useful for scenarios where the administrator wants to use an external IPAM solution or assign an IP address later5.

Regardless of the assignment type, the IP address is assigned when the VM is powered on. This is because Prism Central needs to communicate with the hypervisor (AHV or ESXi) to configure the virtual NIC (vNIC) of the VM with the IP address information. This communication can only happen when the VM is in a powered on state6.

References: 4: IP Address Management - Prism Central Guide 5: Creating a New Report - Prism Central Guide 6: IP Address Assignment - AHV Networking Guide

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

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights, IPAM enables AHV to assign IP addresses automatically to VMs using DHCP. You can configure each virtual network and associated VLAN with a specific IP subnet, associated domain settings, and group of IP address pools available for assignment.

According to the web search results, the policy that should be used to meet this requirement is an Isolation Environment Policy. An Isolation Environment Policy is a type of security policy that can be created in Prism Central using Flow Network Security, which is a feature that provides microsegmentation and network security for Nutanix environments1. An Isolation Environment Policy allows the administrator to isolate a group of VMs from another group of VMs based on their categories, and block all traffic between them regardless of direction2. This policy can be useful for creating isolated environments for testing, development, or compliance purposes2.

Explanation/Reference:

First Preference:

• Policy is applied to a specific entity

2nd Preference:

• Policy is applied to an entity type in a category

3rd Preference:

• Policy is applied to an entity type in a cluster

4th Preference:

• Policy is applied to all entities of an entity type

Comprehensive Detailed Explanation with References:In Nutanix Prism, when multiple alert policies are created and applied to the same entities, the policies are evaluated based on their specificity. The order of precedence from highest to lowest is as follows:

• Policy is applied to a specific entity: Custom alert policies that are applied to specific entities take precedence over those applied to broader categories. This is because the more specific policy is usually created with a particular context or requirement in mind for that entity.
• Policy is applied to an entity type in a category: The next level of precedence is given to policies that are applied to all entities of a certain type within a specific category. Categories allow grouping of entities based on certain criteria, and policies applied here are more specific than to an entire cluster or entity type.
• Policy is applied to an entity type in a cluster: This refers to policies that are applied to all entities of a certain type within a specific cluster. This is more general than the above two but still targets a specific cluster environment.
• Policy is applied to all entities of an entity type: The lowest precedence is given to policies that are broadly applied to all entities of a particular type across the entire Nutanix environment.

This order ensures that the most specifically targeted policies are given priority, which allows for fine-tuned control and customization of alert policies. The details of alert policy precedence are typically covered in the Nutanix Prism Central Guide and the documentation related to Prism Central's alerting and policies.

Prism Element and NCC are two ways to run all NCC checks manually on a Nutanix cluster. Prism Element is the web console that provides management and monitoring capabilities for a single Nutanix cluster. Prism Element has a Health dashboard that shows the status of various components and services in the cluster, such as disks, nodes, CVMs, NCC, and alerts. The Health dashboard also allows the administrator to run NCC checks manually by using the Actions drop-down menu on the right side of the screen. The administrator can choose to run all NCC checks or specific checks based on the category or severity. The NCC checks will run in the background and generate a report that can be viewed or downloaded from the Summary tab. This method is easier and faster than running NCC from the command line on the CVM.

NCC stands for Nutanix Cluster Check, which is a framework of scripts that performs system checks and validations on Nutanix clusters. NCC can detect issues related to hardware, software, configuration, hypervisor, networking, and more. NCC can be run from the command line interface (CLI) of any CVM in the cluster by using the ncc command. To run all NCC checks manually, the administrator can use the command ncc health_checks run_all, which will execute all available checks and display the results on the screen. This method is more comprehensive and detailed than running NCC from Prism Element.

References: : [Health Dashboard - Prism Element Guide] : [Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) - Nutanix Support & Insights] : [Running NCC Checks - Nutanix Support & Insights]

Answer: A. VM-VM anti-Affinity policy

A VM-VM anti-Affinity policy is a rule that ensures that two or more VMs don’t run on the same AHV host. It’s useful when an application provides HA and an AHV host can’t be an application’s single point of failure1. In this case, the SQL cluster VMs should have a VM-VM anti-Affinity policy configured to prevent them from running on the same host and causing an outage if that host fails. A VM-VM anti-Affinity policy can be created using the aCLI commands2. The other options are not relevant for this scenario.

References: 1: Affinity Policies - Nutanix Support & Insights 2: Affinity Policies Help | Nutanix Community

According to the image description, the exhibit shows a screenshot of a computer screen with a table of data. The table has 6 columns and 4 rows. The columns are labeled “Date”, “Time”, “Status”, “Details”, “Configuration”, and “Duration”. The rows contain information about different configurations and their statuses. The background is a light blue color. There is a pop-up message on the bottom right corner of the screen that reads “This question has been answered. Click here to enable the edit button.”

Based on the table data, it seems that the screenshot is taken from the Prism Central web console, showing the results of a cluster health check report. The report shows that there are four failed checks: Host Password Policy, CVM Password Policy, NTP Configuration, and Cluster Time Skew2. These checks indicate that some initial cluster configuration tasks were missed during the deployment process.

The Host Password Policy check verifies that the host passwords are not set to default values and are compliant with the password policy defined in Prism Central3. The CVM Password Policy check verifies that the CVM passwords are not set to default values and are compliant with the password policy defined in Prism Central4. These checks are important for ensuring the security and compliance of the cluster. Therefore, changing the host and CVM passwords from their default values and following the password policy guidelines are two initial cluster configuration tasks that were missed.

References: 1: VM Details View - Nutanix Support & Insights 2: Cluster Health - Nutanix Support & Insights 3: Host Password Policy - Nutanix Support & Insights 4: CVM Password Policy - Nutanix Support & Insights

Active-Active is a bond mode that allows all uplinks in the bond to be used simultaneously for traffic transmission and reception. This bond mode provides load balancing and increased bandwidth for the AHV host and its VMs. Active-Active bond mode uses a hashing algorithm based on source MAC addresses to distribute traffic across different uplinks in the bond. Each individual VM NIC uses only a single bond member interface at a time, but multiple VM NICs are spread across different bond member interfaces. As a result, it is possible for a Nutanix AHV node with two 10 Gb interfaces to use up to 20 Gbps of network throughput, while individual VMs have a maximum throughput of 10 Gbps6.

Therefore, if an administrator needs to optimize for maximum single VM throughput, they should select Active-Active bond mode for their AHV cluster. This bond mode can be configured using Prism Element UI or manage-ovs commands on each AHV host7. No additional configuration is required on the upstream switch side, as long as the switches are interconnected physically or virtually and both uplinks trunk the same VLANs8.

"Playbook allows you to define a trigger that results in the execution of an action or a series of actions. A trigger may be an event that occurs in the system, such as an alert or a request made by you. The resultant actions that you configure can be VM actions, communication actions, alert actions, or report actions." https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Intelligent-Operations-Guide-vpc_2023_3:ssp-report-management-ssp-pc-c.html#:~:text=The%20environment%20summary%20report%20provides,is%20registered%20to%20Prism%20Central.

"An administrator has been tasked with increasing security on Nutanix cluster by disabling password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead moving to key-based SSH, What is the easiest way for the administrator to meet these needs? Enable Cluster Lockdown and provide an RSA key."

 Cluster Lockdown mode disables password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead requires key-based SSH. To enable Cluster Lockdown mode, you need to provide an RSA key.

Therefore, by enabling Cluster Lockdown mode and providing an RSA key, you can increase security on Nutanix cluster by disabling password authentication when accessing the CVM and AHV hosts and instead moving to key-based SSH with minimal effort.

https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/streamlined-login-and-increase-security-key-based-ssh-login-37397

According to the Troubleshooting hosted disk I/O performance problems (1008885), when using VMware hosted products, consider that both the virtual machines and host operating system often share the same disk resources and hardware. If a hard disk fails, the virtual machines that have data on the failed device will experience an HA event, causing them to restart on a node that contains the replica data.

According to the Nutanix Community1, users can authenticate using their Active Directory credentials when Active Directory support is enabled for Prism Central. To enable Active Directory support, you need to configure Role Mapping12, which defines how Active Directory groups map to Prism Central roles.

https://next.nutanix.com/ncm-intelligent-operations-formerly-prism-pro-ultimate-26/configuring-authentication-38051

Enable Memory Overcommit on the over-provisioned VMs is the most efficient resolution to enable additional VMs to be created. Memory overcommit allows VMs to use more memory than physically available on a host by compressing and swapping memory pages to storage1. This can improve memory utilization and increase VM density on a cluster1. However, memory overcommit is not supported when HA is configured to use reserved hosts, so you may need to disable HA reservation on the cluster before enabling memory overcommit1.

According to the CPU (%) - VMware Docs web search result2, one of the possible causes of high CPU ready % is over-provisioning vCPUs for a VM or having too many VMs on a host. CPU ready % indicates the percentage of time that the VM was ready, but could not get scheduled to run on the physical CPU. High CPU ready % can lead to VM performance problems, such as slow response time or application latency. To improve VM performance, the administrator should reduce the number of vCPUs assigned to VMs or reduce the number of VMs on the hosts, so that there is less contention for CPU resources.

According to the How to use the cvm_shutdown script web search result3, the cvm_shutdown script signals HA when shutting down the CVM (Controller VM) to forward the storage traffic to another healthy CVM. Instead of using sudo shutdown or sudo reboot commands, this script should be used to minimize I/O hits in user VMs running on the present hypervisor host. The cvm_shutdown -P now command will initiate the shutdown process on the CVM immediately. Therefore, if the administrator needs to perform an orderly shutdown of the CVM, they should execute this command from the CVM.

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.

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.