Nutanix Exam Quality Assurance & Improvement 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A Nutanix cluster has an RF2 protection policy. How many simultaneous node failures can it tolerate without data loss?
- Zero — any node failure risks data loss
- One node failure (Correct answer)
- Two node failures
- Three node failures
Correct answer: One node failure
RF2 stores two copies of all data, allowing the cluster to survive a single node failure while remaining fully operational.
Question 2: What is the purpose of running 'ncc health_checks run_all' from the CVM command line?
- To restart all Nutanix cluster services in sequence
- To execute the full suite of NCC health checks and generate a diagnostic report (Correct answer)
- To collect logs from all nodes for Nutanix Support
- To validate network connectivity between all CVMs
Correct answer: To execute the full suite of NCC health checks and generate a diagnostic report
This command triggers all registered NCC health checks across the cluster and outputs a consolidated pass/warn/fail report.
Question 3: Which Nutanix feature should an administrator configure to receive automated alerts when cluster CPU utilization exceeds a defined threshold?
- NCC scheduled check policy
- Prism Alert Policies with email or webhook notification (Correct answer)
- Pulse telemetry severity filters
- AOS auto-scaling triggers
Correct answer: Prism Alert Policies with email or webhook notification
Prism Alert Policies allow administrators to define metric thresholds and automatically notify teams via email or webhook when thresholds are breached.
Question 4: In Nutanix, what does a high 'Controller Read I/O Latency' value most likely indicate?
- Excessive VM snapshot chains causing metadata overhead
- Data is not being served from cache and is being read from slower storage tiers (Correct answer)
- Network congestion between CVMs on the storage backbone
- The replication factor has been temporarily reduced to RF1
Correct answer: Data is not being served from cache and is being read from slower storage tiers
High read latency on the controller typically means cache miss rates are elevated and reads are falling through to slower HDD or remote storage.
Question 5: Which tool within Nutanix LCM (Life Cycle Manager) ensures hardware firmware is at supported and secure versions?
- LCM inventory and update engine (Correct answer)
- NCC firmware compatibility check
- Prism Central Security Dashboard
- Foundation firmware validation module
Correct answer: LCM inventory and update engine
LCM inventories all hardware components and provides one-click updates to ensure firmware versions are supported, secure, and compatible.
Question 6: What is the best practice for validating a Nutanix cluster's network quality between CVMs?
- Use the 'vlan_check' NCC plugin to test inter-CVM bandwidth
- Run the 'network_segment_check' and review inter-node latency metrics in Prism (Correct answer)
- Ping each CVM from a client workstation and record round-trip times
- Check the switch port error counters via SNMP polling
Correct answer: Run the 'network_segment_check' and review inter-node latency metrics in Prism
NCC's network checks including network_segment_check validate CVM connectivity, VLAN configuration, and flag latency or packet-loss anomalies.
Question 7: When should an administrator consider increasing the replication factor from RF2 to RF3 on a Nutanix cluster?
- When cluster storage utilization drops below 50% and capacity is available
- When workloads are mission-critical and the business requires tolerance for two simultaneous failures (Correct answer)
- When the cluster has more than 10 nodes and deduplication savings exceed 40%
- When Nutanix Support recommends it as part of an NCC remediation step
Correct answer: When workloads are mission-critical and the business requires tolerance for two simultaneous failures
RF3 is justified for mission-critical workloads where simultaneous dual-node failure tolerance is required, at the cost of 3x storage overhead.
Nutanix Exam Quality Assurance & Improvement 4
A Nutanix cluster has an RF2 protection policy.
How many simultaneous node failures can it tolerate without data loss?