Nutanix Exam Risk Assessment & Management 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A Nutanix administrator is assessing the risk of a CVM (Controller VM) failure on a node. What is the EXPECTED cluster behavior when one CVM fails?
- The entire cluster goes offline until the CVM is restored
- Other CVMs automatically handle I/O for the affected node transparently (Correct answer)
- Only VMs on that node lose storage access permanently
- A manual failover must be initiated by the administrator
Correct answer: Other CVMs automatically handle I/O for the affected node transparently
Nutanix's distributed storage fabric allows other CVMs to transparently handle I/O for a failed CVM's node, ensuring continued cluster operations.
Question 2: In a risk assessment, which Nutanix storage policy MOST reduces the risk of data loss from a two-node simultaneous failure in a large cluster?
- RF2 with compression enabled
- RF3 with erasure coding disabled
- RF3 or Erasure Coding with FT2 tolerance (Correct answer)
- RF1 with deduplication enabled
Correct answer: RF3 or Erasure Coding with FT2 tolerance
RF3 or Erasure Coding with Fault Tolerance 2 (FT2) allows the cluster to survive two simultaneous node or disk failures without data loss.
Question 3: Which risk is MOST directly mitigated by enabling Nutanix Data-at-Rest Encryption (DARE) with external key management (KMS)?
- Risk of unauthorized VM cloning
- Risk of data exposure if storage drives are physically removed or stolen (Correct answer)
- Risk of snapshot deletion by ransomware
- Risk of network eavesdropping on VM traffic
Correct answer: Risk of data exposure if storage drives are physically removed or stolen
DARE with external KMS ensures that data on drives is unreadable without the encryption keys, mitigating the risk of data exposure from physical drive theft.
Question 4: An organization's risk register lists 'insufficient audit logging' as a medium risk for their Nutanix environment. Which Prism feature BEST addresses this risk?
- Enabling VM snapshots on all workloads
- Configuring Prism audit trails and SIEM integration via syslog (Correct answer)
- Increasing the cluster Replication Factor
- Enabling storage compression on all containers
Correct answer: Configuring Prism audit trails and SIEM integration via syslog
Prism's audit trail feature combined with syslog/SIEM integration ensures all administrative actions are logged and forwarded to a centralized security monitoring system.
Question 5: A risk assessment identifies that a key administrator is the only person with Nutanix cluster credentials. Which risk management control BEST addresses this single point of human failure?
- Enabling IPMI access on all nodes
- Implementing role-based access control (RBAC) with multiple admin accounts (Correct answer)
- Increasing node count in the cluster
- Enabling erasure coding on all storage containers
Correct answer: Implementing role-based access control (RBAC) with multiple admin accounts
Implementing RBAC with multiple administrator accounts eliminates the dependency on a single person and ensures cluster management continuity.
Question 6: During a Nutanix risk review, an assessor recommends enabling 'Alert Email Notifications' in Prism. Which risk management phase does this PRIMARILY support?
- Risk avoidance
- Risk transfer
- Risk detection and early warning (Correct answer)
- Risk acceptance
Correct answer: Risk detection and early warning
Alert email notifications enable early detection of cluster health issues, allowing administrators to respond before risks escalate into outages.
Question 7: An organization uses Nutanix and wants to quantify the financial risk of a cluster outage. Which metric represents the estimated cost of downtime per hour?
- RPO
- MTBF
- Cost of Downtime (CoD) (Correct answer)
- Replication Factor
Correct answer: Cost of Downtime (CoD)
Cost of Downtime (CoD) quantifies the financial impact per hour of a system outage, enabling risk prioritization and investment justification for HA solutions.
Nutanix Exam Risk Assessment & Management 5
A Nutanix administrator is assessing the risk of a CVM (Controller VM) failure on a node.
What is the EXPECTED cluster behavior when one CVM fails?