NCP Nutanix Architecture and Concepts 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is Nutanix Volumes (formerly DSF Block Store) used for?
- Providing NFS shares to AHV VMs
- Exposing iSCSI block storage to external hosts, bare-metal servers, or non-AHV hypervisors (Correct answer)
- Storing Nutanix cluster backups on S3-compatible object storage
- Caching frequently read VM images on SSDs
Correct 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.
Question 2: Which Nutanix product provides file services (SMB/NFS) natively on the HCI cluster?
- Nutanix Objects
- Nutanix Files (formerly Acropolis File Services) (Correct answer)
- Nutanix Volumes
- Nutanix Era
Correct 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.
Question 3: What is the Nutanix 'Pithos' service responsible for?
- Managing user authentication and RBAC
- Storing vDisk configuration and metadata within the CVM (Correct answer)
- Handling cluster-wide certificate management
- Orchestrating live VM migrations between hosts
Correct 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.
Question 4: How does Nutanix handle a disk failure within a node?
- The entire node is taken offline until the disk is replaced
- Nutanix automatically rebuilds the data from replicas on other nodes while the cluster continues serving I/O (Correct answer)
- Only the affected VMs are migrated; other VMs on the node continue with degraded performance
- A manual rebuild process must be triggered by the administrator through Prism
Correct 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.
Question 5: What is the difference between Nutanix Replication Factor 2 (RF2) and RF3?
- RF2 stores 2 copies and tolerates 1 node failure; RF3 stores 3 copies and tolerates 2 simultaneous node failures (Correct answer)
- RF2 is for SSDs only; RF3 applies to HDD tiers
- RF2 requires a dedicated metadata node; RF3 distributes metadata across all nodes
- RF2 uses synchronous replication; RF3 uses asynchronous replication
Correct 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.
Question 6: In Nutanix, what is the 'Consistency Group' concept used for in data protection?
- A set of VMs whose snapshots are taken simultaneously to ensure application-consistent point-in-time recovery (Correct answer)
- A group of nodes configured to use the same RF level
- A collection of storage containers sharing the same deduplication domain
- A cluster of Prism Central instances for high availability
Correct 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.
Question 7: What is the function of the Nutanix 'Hermes' service?
- Manages the CVM upgrade process during AOS updates
- Handles alert notifications and event routing within the Nutanix cluster (Correct answer)
- Provides the REST API gateway for external integrations
- Manages iSCSI session establishment for Nutanix Volumes
Correct 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.
NCP Nutanix Architecture and Concepts 5
What is Nutanix Volumes (formerly DSF Block Store) used for?