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The Nutanix ECA course provides detailed procedures for performing hardware upgrades, such as adding host memory, to ensure cluster stability and data availability. Upgrading host memory requires safely preparing the node to avoid disrupting running VMs or cluster operations.

Extract from Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) Course Documents:

Module: Cluster Management, Section: Hardware Upgrades"Before performing hardware upgrades, such as adding host memory, the node must be placed into maintenance mode. This ensures that all VMs are migrated to other nodes and the host is safely isolated from cluster operations."

Module: Host Maintenance, Section: Maintenance Mode"Placing a node into maintenance mode is the first step for hardware upgrades. Maintenance mode migrates all VMs to other nodes, stops the Controller VM (CVM), and prepares the host for safe shutdown or hardware changes."

Explanation of Options:

A. Gracefully stop the host by using the out of band management interfaceThis is incorrect. Stopping the host via the out-of-band management interface (e.g., IPMI or iLO) without first entering maintenance mode risks disrupting running VMs and cluster services. The ECA course warns:"Shutting down a host without maintenance mode can cause VM crashes and data unavailability, as VMs are not migrated."

B. Remove node from the clusterThis is incorrect. Removing a node from the cluster is a permanent action that detaches it from the cluster’s metadata and storage pool, requiring re-imaging to rejoin. It is not appropriate for a temporary hardware upgrade like adding memory. The ECA course states:"Removing a node is not required for hardware upgrades and should be avoided, as it disrupts cluster configuration."

C. Execute "shutdown -h now" from the AHV command line interfaceThis is incorrect. Running shutdown -h now on the AHV host without entering maintenance mode will abruptly stop the host, potentially crashing VMs and disrupting cluster operations. The ECA course notes:"Directly shutting down a host via CLI without maintenance mode risks data loss and service disruption."

D. Place node into maintenance modeThis is the correct answer. Placing the node into maintenance mode is the first step for hardware upgrades, as it safely migrates all VMs to other nodes, stops the CVM, and prepares the host for shutdown or hardware changes. The ECA course emphasizes that maintenance mode ensures cluster stability during upgrades.

Supporting Extract:"To upgrade host memory, place the node into maintenance mode using Prism Element or the CLI command ncli host maintenance_mode. This ensures safe VM migration and host isolation."

Additional Context from ECA:

Maintenance Mode Process: In Prism Element, maintenance mode can be enabled underHardware > Host > Enter Maintenance Mode. The process automatically migrates VMs using live migration, stops the CVM, and isolates the host. For AHV, the CLI command is ncli host maintenance_mode id= enable=true.

Memory Upgrade: After entering maintenance mode, the host can be safely powered off to add memory, then powered back on and exited from maintenance mode.

Supporting Reference from Web Results:

The Nutanix Bible (https://www.nutanix.com/go/the-nutanix-bible) confirms: "Maintenance mode is the required first step for host hardware upgrades, ensuring VMs are migrated and the node is isolated before changes like memory upgrades."

The best way to test the performance of a Linux VM that is underperforming at the storage level on an ESXi cluster, while minimizing downtime, is to migrate the VM to an AHV-based cluster. This allows leveraging Nutanix-native storage optimizations and hypervisor capabilities of AHV.

From theNutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA)course materials:

“AHV and Nutanix storage integration is natively optimized for performance, leveraging capabilities like data locality, I/O path enhancements, and advanced metadata management. Migrating workloads from ESXi to AHV can often resolve performance bottlenecks associated with storage I/O.”

Additionally:

“Using the Nutanix Move tool, administrators can migrate running VMs between different hypervisors (e.g., ESXi to AHV) with minimal downtime and fully automated steps, reducing the operational burden.”

Increasing vCPUs would not address storage-level performance issues, and collapsing disks would require significant reconfiguration and VM downtime. vDisk sharding is not directly user-configurable and not applicable in this scenario.

A cluster runway below 365 days does not necessarily indicate an issue if Intelligent Operations determines that workloads are sustainable.

Option B (Because new workloads are sustainable) is correct:

Nutanixanalyzes resource trendsand marks clusters as healthyif new workloads are within projected capacity.

Option A (Storage Runway is still good) is incorrect:

Storage isone component, butCPU and memoryalso affect runway calculations.

Option C (Recommended resources) is incorrect:

Recommendations help optimize capacity, butdo not define cluster health.

Option D (Target is 1 month) is incorrect:

The scenario’s target window does not impact the actual runway calculation.

Agent VMs, such as CVMs (Controller VMs) or Witness VMs, have strict affinity and anti-affinity rules to ensure they remain on specific hosts and maintain data consistency and high availability. If an agent VM is powered off and then manually started on another host, it becomes unresponsive because it breaks these rules.

From theNutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA)course materials:

“Agent VMs have specific configuration and affinity constraints. Manually starting them on another host violates these constraints, resulting in the agent VM becoming unresponsive to the cluster.”

Further clarification:

“The cluster expects the agent VM to be on a particular host. Moving it manually to another host breaks this expectation and causes the VM to be unable to properly join the cluster services, leading to an unresponsive state.”

Therefore, it is essential to avoid manually starting agent VMs on different hosts, as doing so can disrupt cluster services.

Nutanix Categories allow administrators to group related VMs, making Disaster Recovery (DR) planning easier.

Option B (Utilize Categories to organize VMs in Recovery Plans) is correct:

Categories help group VMsbased on application tiers(e.g.,database, middleware, web servers).

This ensuresorderly failoverwhile maintaining application dependencies.

Option A (Naming schema) is incorrect:

Naming conventions help, but theydo not provide functional organizationin recovery plans.

Option C (1:10 Recovery Plan to VMs) is incorrect:

The ratio depends onbusiness requirements, not a fixed number.

Option D (RESTful APIs) is incorrect:

Automation is useful, butit does not replace proper VM grouping via categories.

Nutanix AHV networking supports multiple bond types that determine how traffic is distributed across physical NICs. The detailed guidance in the AHV networking section states:

“Active-Active bonding provides load distribution of outbound traffic across all interfaces in the bond, allowing aggregate throughput beyond a single physical adapter.”

Active-backup keeps only one NIC active at a time and provides no throughput gain. Active-Active with MAC pinning distributes VMs across NICs but does not aggregate the total throughput for a single VM and is typically used with switch-independent designs.

Because the requirement is to “take advantage of bandwidth beyond a single adapter,” only the standard Active-Active bond type satisfies this, as it truly aggregates available bandwidth.

Therefore, the correct bond type is Active-Active.

Nutanix performance troubleshooting guidelines highlight CPU Ready Time as a key indicator of CPU contention. The documentation explains:

“High CPU Ready Time indicates that vCPUs are waiting to be scheduled on physical cores due to host CPU saturation or CPU overcommitment.”

CPU Ready Time doesnotrelate to storage issues or CVM sizing. Instead, it indicates that the hypervisor cannot schedule VM CPU operations promptly.

Internal extracts clearly describe the next diagnostic step:

“When CPU ready metrics rise, the first step is to check physical host CPU utilization to confirm whether the host is oversubscribed or running at high CPU usage.”

If the host is overloaded, remediation includes distributing VMs across hosts, reducing vCPU count on oversized VMs, or adding compute resources.

Other options are irrelevant:

Memory oversubscription is unrelated to CPU Ready Time.

SSD capacity affects storage latency, not CPU scheduling.

CVM CPU counts do not cause VM CPU Ready Time; CVM resource misconfiguration affects cluster services, not guest VM scheduling.

Thus, reviewing host CPU utilization is the correct next step.

When creating templates in Nutanix, Prism Central supports two official, built-in guest customization frameworks depending on the operating system family.

The Nutanix guest customization documentation states:

“For Windows VMs, Prism Central supports Sysprep-based customization. For Linux VMs, Prism Central supports Cloud-init customization.”

These two tools allow automation of hostname assignment, networking configuration, user accounts, and post-deployment initialization.

Additional extracts from internal documentation:

“Sysprep is automatically invoked during clone operations from Windows templates to ensure that the cloned VM receives unique identifiers.”

“Cloud-init is used for Linux templates to allow dynamic provisioning, SSH key injection, and package installation during instantiation.”

Nutanix does not list “Custom Script” or “Guided Script” as valid VM template customization mechanisms. Scripting can be applied after deployment but not as a built-in template customization framework.

Thus, the only valid template customization options are Sysprep and Cloud-init.

Scale-out Prism Central deployments consist of multiple nodes running the Prism Central service. Nutanix documentation emphasizes that:

“When deploying multi-node Prism Central, an FQDN backed by DNS can provide request distribution across all Prism Central nodes, enabling load balancing and increased concurrency.”

A Virtual IP in contrast only directs traffic to a single active Prism Central node. Internal behavior notes:

“A VIP is not active-active; it designates one node as primary for all inbound requests.”

“Using an FQDN with DNS round-robin or an external load balancer allows the cluster to distribute workload across all PC nodes.”

The FQDN allows:

distributing API/UI traffic across multiple Prism Central nodes

improving performance under heavy load

enabling parallel query handling

avoiding bottlenecks on the primary node

SSL certificates apply to either VIP or FQDN. Segmentation and resiliency are unrelated to FQDN usage.

Thus, the correct answer is Load Balancing.