The change password at next logon attribute is a setting that forces a user to change their password when they log on to a domain for the first time or after their password has expired. This attribute is enabled by default for new Active Directory user accounts or when an administrator resets a user’s password4.

However, Prism Central does not support this attribute for Active Directory authentication. Users with this attribute enabled will not be able to log on to Prism Central using their Active Directory credentials. They will receive an error message saying “Invalid credentials” or “Authentication failed” when they try to log on5.

Therefore, if an administrator is not able to log on to Prism Central using a new Active Directory user account, the most likely cause of this issue is that the change password at next logon attribute is set for that user account. To resolve this issue, the administrator should disable this attribute for the user account or log on to a domain workstation first and change their password before accessing Prism Central6.

According to the Nutanix Prism Central Guide, to configure a syslog server in Prism Central, you need to specify the transport protocol (TCP or UDP) and the IP address/port of the syslog server.

CloudInit is a package that contains utilities for early initialization of cloud instances. It allows you to customize virtual machines provided by a cloud vendor by modifying the generic OS configuration on boot. You can use CloudInit to set the OS hostname, add custom users, add keys, run custom scripts, and more2. CloudInit is supported by most major Linux and FreeBSD operating systems and works across different cloud platforms3. Sysprep is a tool for Windows operating systems that prepares an installation for cloning, auditing, and customer delivery4.

References: 1: Replacing Nodes in Nutanix Cluster - Nutanix Support & Insights 2: Customize a Linux VM with cloud-init in Azure - Azure Virtual Machines 3: Cloud-Init - The standard for customising cloud instances 4: Sysprep (Generalize) a Windows installation

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.

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 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.

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

Deploy the Move appliance and Import the .vmdk into the Image Service. These are two methods that can be used to migrate a VM from VMware ESXi to AHV2. The Move appliance is a tool that automates the migration process by converting the VM disks and configuration to AHV format and transferring them to the Nutanix cluster3. The Image Service is a feature that allows users to upload and manage disk images that can be used to create or clone VMs on AHV4. By importing the .vmdk file of the VMware VM into the Image Service, users can create a new AHV VM from that image.

In Nutanix AHV, when creating a virtual switch and trying to add network interfaces (NICs) to it, the NICs must be connected to the network before they can be selected and assigned to the switch. If the interfaces are showing as disconnected, the system will not allow them to be added to a virtual switch because it cannot verify their operational status or the presence of a live network connection.

It is a standard requirement for the interfaces to have physical connectivity (i.e., network cables plugged in and connected to a live switch port) so that the AHV host can detect the link status as up. Once the interfaces are connected and recognized by the host, they can then be added to a virtual switch in the Nutanix AHV.

It's important to note that while the command-line interface (CLI) is indeed a powerful tool for managing network configurations on AHV hosts, and some configurations do indeed require CLI, the inability to select disconnected interfaces is not specifically a limitation that requires the use of CLI to overcome. The focus should be on ensuring that the physical connectivity is established for the interfaces in question.

This behavior is consistent with networking best practices and Nutanix's network configuration guidelines, as detailed in the Nutanix AHV Networking Guide. This guide explains the requirements and procedures for configuring virtual switches and managing NICs in a Nutanix AHV environment.

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.

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.

The only option that requires iSCSI initiator configuration in the guest OS to use Volumes is Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster. Volumes is an enterprise-class, software-defined block storage solution that exposes storage resources directly to virtualized guest operating systems or physical hosts using the iSCSI protocol7. To use Volumes, customers need to configure iSCSI initiators on their hosts or guest OSes. However, some applications or services can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators when running on AHV VMs. These include:

• SQL Server Always On Availability Group: This is a high availability and disaster recovery solution for SQL Server databases that uses Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Availability Groups (AGs) as its core components. When running on AHV VMs, SQL Server Always On Availability Group can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.
• Oracle RAC: This is a clustered database system that provides high availability and scalability for Oracle databases. When running on AHV VMs, Oracle RAC can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.
• Exchange DAG: This is a group of up to 16 mailbox servers that hosts a set of databases and provides automatic database-level recovery from failures that affect individual servers or databases. When running on AHV VMs, Exchange DAG can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.

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.

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.

According to the web search results, the two impacts on the cluster that will result from increasing the vCPU count on all of the VDI VMs are:

• Increase CPU utilization%: CPU utilization is the percentage of time that a CPU is busy executing instructions5. By increasing the vCPU count on all of the VDI VMs, the administrator will increase the demand for CPU resources on the cluster, which will increase the CPU utilization percentage6.
• Increase CPU ready%: CPU ready is the percentage of time that a vCPU is ready to run but is waiting for a physical CPU to become available5. By increasing the vCPU count on all of the VDI VMs, the administrator will increase the contention for physical CPU resources on the cluster, which will increase the CPU ready percentage6. A high CPU ready percentage can indicate performance issues such as latency or slowdowns5.

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.

The best way for the administrator to configure Prism to send encrypted messages to a set of recipients is to set the SMTP Security Mode to STARTTLS. This will ensure that all messages sent over SMTP are encrypted and secure. Additionally, the administrator should consider installing SSL certificates on Prism Central to ensure that the messages are being sent securely. Finally, the administrator should consider configuring Prism Central to use Cluster Lockdown, which will help ensure that the messages are only sent to the intended recipients.

https://hyperhci.com/2019/07/22/nutanix-lcm-upgrade-process-failed-trouble-shooting/

A bond is a logical interface that combines two or more physical interfaces on an AHV host. A bond provides high availability and load balancing for the network traffic of the host and its VMs. A bond can have different modes that determine how the traffic is distributed and how the bond handles failures of the physical interfaces. The most common bond modes are active-backup, active-active, and LACP1.

Nutanix recommends including at least two physical interfaces in every bond to ensure high availability and redundancy. If one of the physical interfaces fails or is disconnected, the other interface can take over the traffic without affecting the connectivity of the host or its VMs. Having at least two physical interfaces in a bond also allows for maintenance operations such as firmware upgrades or cable replacements without downtime2.

Nutanix does not recommend including NIC models from different vendors in the same bond, as this may cause compatibility issues or performance degradation. Nutanix also does not recommend using only one physical interface in a bond, as this provides no redundancy or load balancing benefits3.

A storage policy can be associated with a VM. A storage policy is a set of rules that define how data objects are stored and protected. It specifies the characteristics of storage, data protection, and data placement for virtual disks that are assigned to a VM. Subnets, catalogs, and categories are not associated with storage policies.https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Prism-Central-Guide-vpc_2022_6:mul-cluster-storage-policy-summary-view-pc-r.html

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.

One node hosts two VMs while the node being upgraded is in maintenance mode. This is because Nutanix supports a feature called Rolling Upgrade that allows upgrading AHV on a cluster without any downtime or impact to the VMs. The Rolling Upgrade feature performs the upgrade one node at a time, by putting the node in maintenance mode, evacuating the VMs to other nodes, upgrading AHV, and then bringing the node back online. The VM-VM anti-affinity policy ensures that the four VMs are not placed on the same node during the evacuation process, so one node will host two VMs temporarily while the other node is being upgraded.

According to the Nutanix Volumes - Recommendations And Best Practices web search result3, two actions that the administrator should take when designing the Volume Group are:

• Distribute workload across multiple virtual disks: Use multiple disks rather than a single large disk for an application. Consider using a minimum of one disk per Nutanix node to distribute the workload across all nodes in a cluster. Multiple disks per Nutanix node may also improve an application’s performance. For performance-intensive environments, we recommend using between four and eight disks per CVM for a given workload.
• Enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling): Receive-side scaling (RSS) allows the system to use multiple CPUs for network activity. With RSS enabled, multiple CPU cores process network traffic, preventing a single CPU core from becoming a bottleneck. Enabling RSS within hosts can be beneficial for heavy iSCSI workloads. For VMs running in ESXi environments, RSS requires VMXNET3 VNICs. For Hyper-V environments, enable VMQ to take full advantage of Virtual RSS.

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 web search results, Prism Central is a multi-cluster manager that provides a single, centralized management interface for Nutanix environments12. One of the features of Prism Central is multi-cluster Single Sign On (SSO), which allows users to log in once and access multiple clusters without re-entering credentials3.

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 number of Prism Central instances required to deploy Leap is one per customer environment. Prism Central is a multi-cluster manager that provides a single, centralized management interface for Nutanix environments3. Leap is a native cloud extension that provides disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for Nutanix environments4. To use Leap, customers need to have one Prism Central instance deployed in their primary site, and register it with their Xi Cloud Services account5. This Prism Central instance can manage multiple Nutanix clusters across different physical sites or availability zones6.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result2, VM NICs on AHV can operate in two modes: Access and Trunked. Access NICs are the default, and allow one VLAN on the NIC. Trunked NICs allow multiple VLANs on a single NIC for VMs that are VLAN aware. If you must use trunked NICs, follow the steps described in the web search result2. Therefore, the most efficient way to have a VM on an AHV cluster with access to multiple VLANs is to update a vNIC on the VM to operate in trunked mode for all desired VLANs.

An Application Security Policy is a security feature in Nutanix AHV that can be used to restrict network communication between virtual servers based on a variety of criteria, such as IP address, port, and protocol. By creating a policy that restricts communication to authorized hosts and applying it to the servers in enforce mode, the administrator can prevent unauthorized communication between virtual servers.

https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv

data size for flash mode exceeds 25% of the SSD capacity could cause the performance issues. Flash mode is a feature that allows vDisks to be pinned to SSDs for faster access, but it has a limit of 25% of the SSD capacity per node. If this limit is exceeded, some vDisks may be evicted from flash mode and cause disk latency2.

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. 

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.

This is because there is no GUI method to unregister a cluster from Prism Central, so the process requires SSH access to the PC VM as well as to a CVM of the cluster2. The unregistration process involves getting the UUID of the cluster from the CVM and then using that to trigger de-registration from PC command line2. The unregistration process also involves cleaning up any associated metadata and configuration on both PC and PE2. Therefore, the administrator needs to use a Host SSH session to perform this task.

One of the NICs needs to be configured on the internal VLAN. This is because the VMs that are isolated need to communicate with the firewall VM through a private network, and the firewall VM needs to communicate with the external network through a public network. The internal VLAN is a logical network that can be created and managed by AHV1. If the firewall VM does not have a NIC on the internal VLAN, it will not be able to route traffic between the isolated VMs and the outside world.

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

The correct answer is C. Network latency.

The diagram shows a solution that uses synchronous replication between two remote protection domains, cluster site A and cluster site B. Synchronous replication is a feature that allows near-zero RPO (recovery point objective) by replicating data to the remote site before acknowledging writes to the local site. However, synchronous replication has some requirements and limitations that must be met for it to work properly. One of these requirements is that the network latency between the two sites must be less than or equal to 5 ms1. If the network latency is higher than 5 ms, the synchronous replication will fail and the protection policy will be suspended2.

Therefore, based on the diagram, the most likely cause of the issue is that the network latency between cluster site A and cluster site B is higher than 5 ms, which prevents the synchronous replication from working. To verify this, the administrator can use the “ncli cluster ping” command to measure the network latency between the two sites3. If the network latency is indeed higher than 5 ms, the administrator can either improve the network performance or switch to a different replication mode, such as near-synchronous or asynchronous.

https://next.nutanix.com/installation-configuration-23/nutanix-vlan-34170

The correct answer is A. Long term storage of data which is written once and read infrequently.

Erasure Coding is a feature that increases the usable capacity on a Nutanix cluster by reducing the amount of data replication. Instead of replicating data, Erasure Coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure. The capacity savings of Erasure Coding is in addition to deduplication and compression savings1.

Erasure Coding is most beneficial for scenarios where the data is written once and read infrequently, such as long term storage of archival data, backup data, or cold data. This is because Erasure Coding has some trade-offs and limitations that may affect the performance and availability of the cluster. Some of these trade-offs and limitations are2:

• Erasure Coding requires more CPU and memory resources than replication, as it involves more complex calculations for encoding and decoding data.
• Erasure Coding increases the network bandwidth consumption, as it involves more data transfers between nodes for encoding and decoding data.
• Erasure Coding reduces the resiliency of the cluster, as it can tolerate fewer node failures than replication. For example, a cluster with redundancy factor 2 can tolerate one node failure with replication, but only two disk failures with Erasure Coding.
• Erasure Coding is not effective for workloads that have many overwrites or random writes, as it involves more overhead for updating the parity information.
• Erasure Coding is not supported for some features, such as volume groups, file server VMs, or Metro Availability.

Therefore, if an administrator needs to configure a container on a Nutanix cluster, they should enable Erasure Coding only if the container will store data that is written once and read infrequently. This way, they can maximize the capacity savings of Erasure Coding without compromising the performance and availability of the cluster.

Nutanix leverages a method for determining the bands called ‘Generalized Extreme Studentized Deviate Test’. A simple way to think about this is similar to a confidence interval where the values are between the lower and upper limits established by the algorithm.

Another web source3 shows an example of how anomaly detection works in Nutanix Prism Central. In the video, you can see that when the observed value of a metric deviates significantly from the predicted value based on historical data, an anomaly event is triggered and displayed on a chart.

Therefore, by comparing the observed values with the predicted values based on historical data, Nutanix anomaly detection can identify abnormal behavior and alert you accordingly.

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

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details/?targetId=BP-2029_AHV:BP-2029_AHV

Administrators can use Acropolis with IPAM to deliver a complete virtualization deployment, including network management, from the unified Prism interface. This capability radically simplifies the traditionally complex network management associated with provisioning VMs and assigning network addresses. To avoid address overlap, be sure to work with your network team to reserve a range of addresses for VMs before enabling the IPAM feature.

The Acropolis master assigns an IP address from the address pool when creating a managed VM NIC; the address releases back to the pool when the VM NIC or VM is deleted.