NCP Storage Management and Data Services 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Nutanix storage feature automatically moves data between SSD and HDD tiers based on access patterns?
- Erasure Coding
- Intelligent Tiering (ILM) (Correct answer)
- Deduplication
- Compression
Correct answer: Intelligent Tiering (ILM)
Nutanix Intelligent Lifecycle Management (ILM) automatically promotes and demotes data between storage tiers based on how frequently it is accessed.
Question 2: What is the default replication factor (RF) in a Nutanix cluster that protects against a single node failure?
- RF1
- RF2 (Correct answer)
- RF3
- RF4
Correct answer: RF2
RF2 stores two copies of data across different nodes, providing tolerance for a single node or disk failure while balancing storage efficiency.
Question 3: Which Nutanix data efficiency feature eliminates redundant data blocks across a storage container?
- Compression
- Erasure Coding
- Deduplication (Correct answer)
- Thick Provisioning
Correct answer: Deduplication
Deduplication identifies and removes identical data blocks, storing only a single instance and replacing duplicates with pointers to reduce storage consumption.
Question 4: In Nutanix AOS, what is a Storage Container?
- A Docker container used for application isolation
- A logical storage policy grouping that maps to a datastore (Correct answer)
- A physical drive enclosure in the node
- A backup repository target
Correct answer: A logical storage policy grouping that maps to a datastore
A Storage Container is a logical grouping within a storage pool that allows administrators to apply storage policies (compression, deduplication, RF) and presents as a datastore to hypervisors.
Question 5: Which Nutanix feature reduces storage space by encoding data with parity, tolerating failures with less overhead than full replication?
- Deduplication
- Erasure Coding (EC-X) (Correct answer)
- Shadow Clones
- Compression
Correct answer: Erasure Coding (EC-X)
Erasure Coding (EC-X) stripes data with parity information across nodes, providing fault tolerance at a lower storage overhead than RF2 or RF3 for cold data.
Question 6: What is the function of the Nutanix Curator service?
- Manages VM snapshot schedules
- Performs background data integrity scans, compression, and deduplication jobs (Correct answer)
- Handles live migration of VMs between nodes
- Provides REST API access to Prism
Correct answer: Performs background data integrity scans, compression, and deduplication jobs
Curator is a distributed metadata service that runs background tasks such as disk balancing, erasure coding, compression, deduplication, and integrity checks across the cluster.
Question 7: When configuring a Nutanix storage container, what does enabling 'Thin Provisioning' mean?
- Disk space is pre-allocated at creation time
- Storage is consumed only as data is actually written (Correct answer)
- Data is compressed before being written to disk
- Snapshots are automatically taken every hour
Correct answer: Storage is consumed only as data is actually written
Thin provisioning allows a container to present more logical capacity than physically available, consuming real storage only as data is written, improving overall utilization.
NCP Storage Management and Data Services 1
Which Nutanix storage feature automatically moves data between SSD and HDD tiers based on access patterns?