Pass the Nutanix SE Academy NCSE-Core Questions and answers with ValidTests

C. Adding Storage Only nodes:

Nutanix allows for the addition of storage-only nodes to a cluster. These nodes provide additional storage capacity without adding compute resources, which is a cost-effective way to increase storage for data retention and compliance purposes.

This capability allows the prospect to scale storage independently of compute, addressing concerns about data retention costs by adding capacity as needed without the overhead of additional CPU and memory resources.

B. Data Locality:

Nutanix's data locality feature ensures that data is always written and read from the local storage of the node where the VM is running. This minimizes latency and provides consistent performance, which addresses the unpredictable storage performance and latency spikes the prospect is experiencing.

By keeping data local to the VM, Nutanix reduces the dependency on the network for storage operations, resulting in improved and predictable performance, especially during peak utilization.

C. When deploying an Oracle RAC database:

Shadow clones should be explicitly disabled when deploying an Oracle RAC database. Oracle RAC requires highly consistent and low-latency storage access, and enabling shadow clones can introduce additional latency and potential inconsistencies that are unsuitable for such databases.

Shadow clones are designed to enhance performance for read-heavy workloads by caching frequently accessed data locally. However, Oracle RAC’s stringent requirements for data consistency and latency make this feature inappropriate for its deployment.

Nutanix Security Configuration Management Automation (SCMA) reduces the effort required to assess and maintain the security of Nutanix infrastructure by automating security compliance checking and remediation. SCMA continuously monitors the configuration of Nutanix CVMs and AHV hosts against documented security baselines (e.g., STIGs). If any non-compliance is detected, SCMA automatically remediates the settings to align with the defined security standards without requiring manual intervention from administrators. This ensures that the cluster remains compliant with security policies throughout its lifecycle, thereby significantly reducing the effort and overhead associated with security management.

References:

Nutanix Bible

For migrating 5 Petabytes of unstructured, archived patient data, Nutanix Objects is the recommended product. Nutanix Objects provides a scalable object storage solution designed to handle large volumes of unstructured data efficiently, making it ideal for archival purposes​​.

Understanding the Requirements:

Replicating data offsite involves several key considerations to ensure data integrity, availability, and compliance with business needs.

Key Questions:

Retention Requirements: Determines how long the replicated data needs to be kept, which impacts storage needs and costs. This helps in defining the replication and retention policies (Nutanix Bible, Data Protection section)​​.

Data Volume: Knowing the amount of data to be replicated ensures proper sizing of network and storage resources. It also helps in understanding the replication bandwidth and storage capacity required (Nutanix-NDB-User-Guide)​​.

WAN Speed and Latency: The speed and latency of the WAN link between source and target sites affect replication performance and the ability to meet RPO (Recovery PointObjective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). High latency can impact data transfer rates and consistency (Nutanix-NDB-User-Guide, Network Requirements section)​​.

Conclusion:

Asking these questions ensures the SE can design a replication solution that meets the prospect's business continuity and disaster recovery needs effectively.

References:

Nutanix Bible on Data Protection

Nutanix NDB User Guide on Network Requirements and Best Practices

CVM (Controller VM) Autopathing allows workloads to continue running on the host during an AOS (Acropolis Operating System) upgrade. This feature ensures that the I/O operations are redirected to other healthy CVMs in the cluster if the local CVM is temporarily unavailable during the upgrade process. This seamless redirection ensures that there is no disruption to the workloads, maintaining continuous operations and high availability during upgrades.

References:

Nutanix Bible​

Current Configuration:

The customer has a 3-node cluster configured for RF2 with 100TB of raw disk space.

Erasure Coding Requirements:

Erasure Coding (EC-X) improves storage efficiency by using a parity-based method to store data.

For EC-X to be enabled, a minimum of 4 nodes is required in the cluster.

Explanation:

RF2 (Replication Factor 2): Requires data to be replicated across at least two nodes.

Erasure Coding: Requires additional nodes beyond the replication factor to store parity information. In this case, a minimum of 4 nodes is needed to implement EC-X.

Required Change:

Add 1 Node: Adding one more node to the existing 3-node cluster will meet the minimum requirement of 4 nodes, allowing the customer to enable Erasure Coding.

Outcome:

By adding an additional node, the cluster will be able to utilize Erasure Coding, thereby gaining additional usable space.

To determine the best configuration, we need to calculate the required storage, including the additional 20% growth and the capacity to re-protect in the event of a node failure:

Initial Storage Requirement:

Usable storage required: 15 TiB

Additional storage for 20% growth: 15×0.2=3 TiB15 \times 0.2 = 3 \text{ TiB}15×0.2=3 TiB

Total storage required: 15+3=18 TiB15 + 3 = 18 \text{ TiB}15+3=18 TiB

Storage with Re-protection:

To ensure data protection and availability, Nutanix typically uses a replication factor (RF) of 2, meaning each piece of data is stored twice.

Therefore, the total raw storage needed: 18 TiB×2=36 TiB18 \text{ TiB} \times 2 = 36 \text{ TiB}18 TiB×2=36 TiB

Given these calculations, we should look for a configuration that provides at least 36 TiB of raw storage. Based on typical Nutanix node configurations, Option D provides the best balance of cost and capacity, ensuring that the requirement for 36 TiB of raw storage is met.

The Nutanix Collector provides performance data over the previous 7 days. This allows for a comprehensive analysis of the environment's performance trends and helps in making informed sizing and configuration decisions.

Data Collection:

Nutanix Collector gathers data points related to CPU, memory, storage, and network usage over a 7-day period.

Analysis Period:

A 7-day data collection period ensures that the analysis captures the variability and peak usage patterns, providing a reliable basis for infrastructure planning.

Usage:

This period is user-friendly and sufficient to identify performance bottlenecks, resource utilization patterns, and to validate that the proposed solution will meet the customer’s requirements.

References:

Nutanix Collector documentation and usage guidelines.

Best practices for performance monitoring and analysis.