NCSE-Core Practice Test

Explanation:

For highly active SQL workloads that write I/Os in 2 MB chunks to a vDisk, compression is the most suitable storage optimization technology. Compression works well with larger I/O sizes and can significantly reduce the storage footprint, providing better capacity optimization. This approach ensures that the large chunks of data are compressed efficiently, maximizing storage utilization and performance.

Explanation:

When an HDD fails, Nutanix's high availability (HA) system ensures the continuation of VM operations by initiating an HA event. The affected VMs will be restarted on a node that contains the replica data, ensuring minimal downtime and data availability.

A prospect is looking for a Nutanix solution for a mission-critical application that needs to sustain two simultaneous node outages and prefers the cluster to fully rebuild both data and metadata in the event of hardware issues. Here is the detailed explanation:

Requirement Analysis:

Sustain two simultaneous node outages.

Fully rebuild both data and metadata after hardware issues.

Feature Analysis:

Nutanix clusters use Replication Factor (RF) to ensure data protection and availability. For RF3 (Replication Factor 3), which protects against two simultaneous node failures, a minimum of 5 nodes is required.

To fully rebuild both data and metadata after failures, the system needs an additional node to ensure there is enough redundancy and performance.

Conclusion:To achieve RF3 and sustain two simultaneous node failures while allowing full rebuild of data and metadata, a minimum of 6 nodes is required.

References:

Nutanix documentation on cluster resiliency and RF configurations

Explanation:

When gathering information about the configuration of VM storage, it is important to understand the provisioning type of the disks. Thin provisioning allows more efficient use of storage by allocating disk space dynamically based on actual usage rather than pre-allocating the entire disk size. The majority of VMs being thin provisioned indicates a strategy to optimize storage utilization and capacity management.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Explanation:

Understanding the Requirements:

To improve the performance of an existing Nutanix cluster, it's important to consider the nature of the workloads and the configuration of the virtual machines (VMs).

Workloads are Multi-threaded (Option A):

Multi-threaded workloads can take advantage of multiple CPU cores, which helps in parallel processing and improves overall performance.

Nutanix clusters benefit from workloads that can efficiently utilize multiple threads since the underlying hypervisor (AHV or ESXi) can allocate multiple vCPUs to VMs, enhancing their performance capabilities.

VMs have more than one vCPU (Option D):

Assigning more than one vCPU to VMs allows them to process multiple instructions simultaneously, leveraging the multi-core capabilities of the physical CPUs.

This configuration is particularly beneficial for performance-sensitive applications that require more computing power and can significantly improve the performance of VMs on the Nutanix cluster. Analysis of Other Options:

Option B: VMs have one vCPU configured:

This option limits the VMs to a single CPU core, which can bottleneck performance for multi-threaded applications and is not optimal for performance improvement.

Option C: VMs have multi-queue disable:

Disabling multi-queue can reduce the network performance by limiting the ability of the VMs to handle multiple network queues, which can be detrimental to performance.

Conclusion:

Therefore, to achieve greater performance, ensuring that workloads are multi-threaded and VMs are configured with more than one vCPU are the optimal strategies.

References:

Nutanix documentation emphasizes the importance of configuring VMs with multiple vCPUs and supporting multi-threaded workloads to maximize performance in Nutanix clusters.