Nutanix Exam Nutanix Exam Data Protection & Disaster Recovery 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the purpose of a 'Remote Site' configuration in a Nutanix Protection Domain?
- Defines where VMs will be live-migrated during maintenance
- Specifies the destination cluster for replication of protected VMs (Correct answer)
- Sets the physical rack location of each node
- Configures the cloud tier for cold data
Correct answer: Specifies the destination cluster for replication of protected VMs
A Remote Site defines the target Nutanix cluster to which snapshot data is replicated for disaster recovery purposes.
Question 2: Which Nutanix feature allows administrators to test a DR failover without impacting production VMs?
- Migrate workload
- Test failover (clone to isolated network) (Correct answer)
- Snapshot rollback
- Planned failover
Correct answer: Test failover (clone to isolated network)
Nutanix supports test failover by cloning replicated VMs into an isolated network on the recovery site, leaving production unaffected.
Question 3: What is the role of 'consistency groups' within a Nutanix Protection Domain?
- Ensure VMs in the group are snapshotted atomically at the same point in time (Correct answer)
- Define which storage container VMs use for their disks
- Group nodes together for high-availability placement
- Enforce QoS policies on storage I/O
Correct answer: Ensure VMs in the group are snapshotted atomically at the same point in time
Consistency groups ensure that all VMs within the group are snapshotted simultaneously to maintain write-order consistency for multi-VM applications.
Question 4: In Nutanix disaster recovery, what does 'planned failover' differ from 'unplanned failover'?
- Planned failover replicates all pending data before switching; unplanned uses the last available snapshot (Correct answer)
- Planned failover only works with Metro Availability; unplanned works with async
- Planned failover is automatic; unplanned requires manual intervention
- There is no difference between the two in Nutanix
Correct answer: Planned failover replicates all pending data before switching; unplanned uses the last available snapshot
Planned failover performs a final replication sync before activating VMs at the DR site, minimizing data loss, whereas unplanned failover uses the last snapshot already at the DR site.
Question 5: Which Nutanix backup integration method allows third-party backup software to use native Nutanix snapshot APIs?
- vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP)
- Nutanix Backup API (NTNX Snapshots API) (Correct answer)
- iSCSI backup targets
- SMB shadow copy
Correct answer: Nutanix Backup API (NTNX Snapshots API)
Nutanix exposes its own snapshot APIs that backup vendors can integrate with to leverage native, crash-consistent snapshots directly from the Nutanix platform.
Question 6: What does 'VM-centric' snapshot management in Nutanix allow compared to traditional storage snapshots?
- Snapshots are taken at the SAN LUN level across all VMs simultaneously
- Each VM can have its own independent snapshot schedule and retention policy (Correct answer)
- Only the hypervisor admin can create snapshots
- Snapshots must be taken during off-peak hours only
Correct answer: Each VM can have its own independent snapshot schedule and retention policy
Nutanix's VM-centric approach lets each VM have its own snapshot schedule and retention policy, managed directly through Prism without storage admin involvement.
What is the purpose of a 'Remote Site' configuration in a Nutanix Protection Domain?