Nutanix Architecture and Concepts Flashcards

What is Nutanix Volumes (formerly DSF Block Store) used for?

Answer: Exposing iSCSI block storage to external hosts, bare-metal servers, or non-AHV hypervisors

Nutanix Volumes exposes the Distributed Storage Fabric as iSCSI LUNs, allowing external servers, Windows clusters, or other hypervisors to use Nutanix storage directly.

Which Nutanix product provides file services (SMB/NFS) natively on the HCI cluster?

Answer: Nutanix Files (formerly Acropolis File Services)

Nutanix Files (formerly AFS) runs as a scale-out file server on the cluster, providing SMB and NFS shares without requiring separate file server infrastructure.

What is the Nutanix 'Pithos' service responsible for?

Answer: Storing vDisk configuration and metadata within the CVM

Pithos is the vDisk configuration store that maintains mappings between vDisks, their extents, and their locations within the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric.

How does Nutanix handle a disk failure within a node?

Answer: Nutanix automatically rebuilds the data from replicas on other nodes while the cluster continues serving I/O

When a disk fails, Nutanix uses the existing replicas of the lost data on other nodes to automatically rebuild redundancy, maintaining RF levels without administrator intervention.

What is the difference between Nutanix Replication Factor 2 (RF2) and RF3?

Answer: RF2 stores 2 copies and tolerates 1 node failure; RF3 stores 3 copies and tolerates 2 simultaneous node failures

RF2 maintains 2 data copies providing single-node failure tolerance, while RF3 maintains 3 copies allowing the cluster to survive two simultaneous node failures.

In Nutanix, what is the 'Consistency Group' concept used for in data protection?

Answer: A set of VMs whose snapshots are taken simultaneously to ensure application-consistent point-in-time recovery

A Consistency Group in Nutanix Protection Domains groups VMs together so their snapshots are crash-consistent with each other, enabling coordinated multi-VM recovery.

What is the function of the Nutanix 'Hermes' service?

Answer: Handles alert notifications and event routing within the Nutanix cluster

Hermes is the Nutanix alerting and notification service that monitors cluster health, generates alerts, and routes them to configured notification channels.