Nutanix Exam Introduction to Nutanix 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is 'Nutanix Foundation' primarily used for?
- Configuring network security policies
- Imaging and bootstrapping new Nutanix nodes and clusters (Correct answer)
- Generating compliance audit reports
- Deploying Kubernetes clusters on AHV
Correct answer: Imaging and bootstrapping new Nutanix nodes and clusters
Foundation is a Nutanix tool used to image bare-metal nodes with AOS and the hypervisor, and to bootstrap new clusters during initial deployment.
Question 2: How does Nutanix Erasure Coding (EC-X) differ from RF2 replication?
- EC-X provides stronger redundancy than RF2 at higher storage cost
- EC-X uses mathematical parity to rebuild lost data, consuming less space than full replicas (Correct answer)
- EC-X only applies to SSD tiers while RF2 applies to HDD
- EC-X requires more nodes than RF2 to function
Correct answer: EC-X uses mathematical parity to rebuild lost data, consuming less space than full replicas
Erasure Coding uses parity chunks to reconstruct lost data, achieving similar fault tolerance as RF2/RF3 but with significantly less storage overhead.
Question 3: Which Nutanix feature enables administrators to set resource limits and reservations for groups of VMs sharing a cluster?
- Nutanix Flow
- Clusters (formerly Xi Cloud)
- Categories and Policies (Correct answer)
- vDisks
Correct answer: Categories and Policies
Nutanix Categories allow VMs to be grouped logically, and policies (including resource limits) can be applied to those groups consistently.
Question 4: What is the function of the 'Nutanix Acropolis' layer?
- It is Nutanix's branding name for Prism management
- It is the platform layer combining AHV hypervisor and Distributed Storage Fabric (Correct answer)
- It is a cloud-only service for AWS integration
- It refers solely to the networking stack in Nutanix
Correct answer: It is the platform layer combining AHV hypervisor and Distributed Storage Fabric
Acropolis is Nutanix's core platform layer that bundles AHV (the hypervisor) and the Distributed Storage Fabric into one integrated compute and storage stack.
Question 5: In Nutanix terminology, what is a 'vDisk'?
- A physical disk in a Nutanix node
- A virtual disk file stored in the Distributed Storage Fabric that backs a VM's drive (Correct answer)
- A dedicated SSD cache partition
- A backup snapshot stored in an external repository
Correct answer: A virtual disk file stored in the Distributed Storage Fabric that backs a VM's drive
A vDisk is a virtual disk object stored within Nutanix DSF that represents a VM's virtual hard drive, abstracted from physical storage.
Question 6: Which Nutanix capability allows a cluster to stretch across two data center sites for zero-RPO disaster recovery?
- Async replication with Leap
- Metro Availability (Sync Replication) (Correct answer)
- Nutanix DR with cloud bursting
- RF3 with cross-site nodes
Correct answer: Metro Availability (Sync Replication)
Metro Availability uses synchronous replication between two sites so that data is written to both simultaneously, enabling zero RPO failover.
Question 7: What best describes the 'scale-out' approach used by Nutanix compared to traditional 'scale-up' storage?
- Scale-out adds more RAM and CPUs to existing nodes; scale-up adds new nodes
- Scale-out adds new nodes to increase capacity linearly; scale-up upgrades existing hardware (Correct answer)
- Scale-out requires external SAN; scale-up uses internal disks
- Scale-out is only for public cloud; scale-up is for on-premises
Correct answer: Scale-out adds new nodes to increase capacity linearly; scale-up upgrades existing hardware
Nutanix scales out by adding commodity nodes, each contributing CPU, RAM, and storage, allowing linear capacity and performance growth.
What is 'Nutanix Foundation' primarily used for?