NCP Storage Management and Data Services 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Nutanix service is responsible for managing metadata and ensuring data locality on the platform?
- Stargate
- Cassandra (Correct answer)
- Zookeeper
- Acropolis
Correct answer: Cassandra
Cassandra is the distributed metadata store in Nutanix AOS that tracks the location of all data blocks across the cluster, enabling fast lookups and data locality.
Question 2: What is the primary purpose of Nutanix Shadow Clones?
- To create point-in-time snapshots for backup
- To cache frequently read VM disks on local nodes to reduce network I/O (Correct answer)
- To replicate data to a remote DR site
- To mirror data to a secondary storage container
Correct answer: To cache frequently read VM disks on local nodes to reduce network I/O
Shadow Clones cache read-only VM disk data locally on nodes that frequently access it, reducing cross-node network traffic and improving read performance.
Question 3: What does the Stargate service in Nutanix AOS primarily handle?
- Cluster configuration and node discovery
- All data I/O operations including reads and writes (Correct answer)
- Hypervisor lifecycle management
- Alert generation and reporting
Correct answer: All data I/O operations including reads and writes
Stargate is the data I/O gateway service in AOS that handles all read and write operations, applying storage policies like compression, deduplication, and replication.
Question 4: In Nutanix, what is the minimum number of nodes required to enable Erasure Coding (EC-X)?
- 2 nodes
- 3 nodes
- 4 nodes (Correct answer)
- 6 nodes
Correct answer: 4 nodes
EC-X requires a minimum of 4 nodes in the cluster because it needs to distribute data strips and parity blocks across enough nodes to achieve meaningful fault tolerance.
Question 5: Which Nutanix protocol allows VMs to access block storage volumes directly, bypassing the hypervisor datastore?
- NFS
- SMB
- iSCSI (Correct answer)
- FTP
Correct answer: iSCSI
Nutanix Volumes (formerly Acropolis Block Services) exposes iSCSI LUNs that can be attached directly to VMs or physical hosts, enabling block-level access to Nutanix storage.
Question 6: What Nutanix data service provides native file storage (NAS) capabilities on the Nutanix platform?
- Nutanix Volumes
- Nutanix Files (formerly AFS) (Correct answer)
- Nutanix Objects
- Nutanix Mine
Correct answer: Nutanix Files (formerly AFS)
Nutanix Files (formerly Acropolis File Services/AFS) provides scalable SMB and NFS file shares natively on the Nutanix cluster using dedicated FSVMs.
Question 7: When Nutanix compression is set to 'Inline', when does compression occur?
- During nightly scheduled maintenance windows
- Immediately as data is written to disk (Correct answer)
- After data has been cold for 60 minutes
- Only when the storage tier is 80% full
Correct answer: Immediately as data is written to disk
Inline compression processes and compresses data immediately in the write path before it is persisted to disk, maximizing storage savings from the moment data is written.
NCP Storage Management and Data Services 2
Which Nutanix service is responsible for managing metadata and ensuring data locality on the platform?