NCA-6.5 Practice Exam Questions with Answers Nutanix Certified Associate (NCA) v6.5 exam Certification

Data Obfuscation is a feature in Pulse that helps secure a customer's private information by obfuscating the data before it is sent to Nutanix. This ensures that any data sent to Nutanix is not visible to anyone other than the customer, and helps protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or malicious actors. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-pulse-c.html

Nutanix Objects is a storage service that can store petabytes of unstructured data and supports S3 APIs. It is a distributed object store that provides an easy-to-use interface for storing and managing objects and data. It also provides advanced features such as versioning, replication, encryption, and access control. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-objects-c.html

To increase the security of a Nutanix environment in response to a request from a company’s security team, an administrator can Enable STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide)

Pulse should only be disabled under the guidance of Nutanix Support and not for any other reason. Pulse is a feature of the Nutanix cluster that enables the cluster to report back health and performance data to Nutanix for troubleshooting and performance optimization purposes. Disabling Pulse without the guidance of Nutanix Support is not recommended, as it could lead to potential issues with the cluster. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-pulse-c.html

The Redfish Protocol and Lifecycle Manager (LCM) provide the biggest benefit of allowing BMC and BIOS updates to be done twice as quickly as before. This is because Redfish and LCM allow for updates to be done in parallel, rather than serially, which reduces the amount of time it takes for an update to be completed. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-redfish-lcm-c.html

LCM (Lifecycle Manager) is a tool provided by Nutanix to automate software and firmware upgrades for Nutanix clusters. However, LCM is unable to perform firmware upgrades against a (D) Single-node cluster configuration.

This is because a single-node cluster does not have any redundancy, so there is no way to perform an upgrade without taking the entire cluster offline. In contrast, multi-node clusters can typically be upgraded in a rolling fashion, with one or more nodes being upgraded at a time while the rest of the cluster remains online.

LCM is capable of performing firmware upgrades against two-node, three-node, and five-node cluster configurations, as long as they meet the other requirements for LCM support (such as being on a supported AOS release and having the appropriate network connectivity).

Nutanix's scale-out storage technology, the Distributed Storage Fabric, makes its hyperconverged platform possible. It provides a single, unified layer of storage to multiple nodes in a cluster, allowing data to be stored, accessed, and processed in a distributed, fault-tolerant manner. Reference: https://www.nutanix.com/what-is-nutanix/distributed-storage-fabric/

The Cluster Runway is located in the Prism Element Analysis dashboard. The Cluster Runway provides an overview of the cluster's performance, including CPU, Memory, and Disk usage, and can be used to identify any potential performance issues. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Prism-Admin-Guide-v5_6:pr-dashboard-overview-c.html

Data Protection is a feature that ensures that data stored on a VM is protected against data loss in the event of hardware failure, data corruption, or other unexpected events. It typically includes features such as snapshots, replication, and backup, which enable administrators to create multiple copies of data and store them in different locations to provide redundancy and ensure availability.

Replication Factor is a related concept, but it is not a VM-level feature in and of itself. Replication Factor is a setting that can be configured at the storage level to determine how many copies of data are stored on different nodes in a distributed storage system. Data Locality and Deduplication are also related concepts, but they do not directly ensure continuous availability of data.

In Prism Central, Image Placement Policies can be used to map images to target clusters using categories. An Image Placement Policy is a set of rules that determine where an image should be placed on the Nutanix cluster. These rules are based on categories, such as the image's OS type, the target cluster's hardware type, and other factors. By creating image placement policies, you can ensure that images are placed on the appropriate clusters, and that they are compatible with the hardware and software requirements of those clusters.

For example, you could create a placement policy that specifies that all Windows images should be placed on a specific cluster, and that all Linux images should be placed on another cluster. You can also set image replication policies on image placement policies, to ensure that images are replicated to multiple clusters for disaster recovery purposes.

Erasure coding is a data efficiency mechanism in Nutanix that replaces the traditional replication factor for suitable data. Erasure coding uses a technique known as "forward error correction" to spread data across multiple drives in a cluster, such that if some drives fail, the data can still be reconstructed. This allows for a much higher storage density and a more efficient use of disk space as compared to traditional replication, where multiple copies of the same data are stored across multiple drives. Deduplication and Compression are also data efficiency mechanisms in Nutanix which help to reduce the storage overhead by eliminating the redundant data. Intelligent Cloning is a Nutanix feature which helps to create multiple instant, space-efficient clones of a VM. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Data-Services-Guide-v2_11:ds-erasure-coding-overview_ds-erasure-coding-overview.html

In Nutanix, all the network uplink ports are connected, but only two of them are carrying traffic at any given time. This is done to provide redundancy and failover in case one of the ports fails. The two ports that are carrying traffic are chosen based on the link aggregation policy configured. The link aggregation policy can be configured to use either Active-Active or Active-Backup mode. In Active-Active mode, both ports are active and carrying traffic, while in Active-Backup mode, only one port is active and carrying traffic, the other port is on standby. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details? targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v5_11:wc-network-configuring-uplink-ports_wc-network-configuring-uplink-ports.html

Enabling Flash Mode will set the storage tier preference to SSD, meaning that data will be stored on the high-performance SSD storage tier. Flash Mode is designed to speed up the performance of applications by ensuring that the most frequently used data is stored on the faster storage tier. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-flash-mode-c.html

Network segmentation is the best feature or configuration for securing network traffic between the management and storage replication environments. Network segmentation is the practice of dividing a computer network into subnets, each serving a different purpose or function. By dividing the network into different segments, it is possible to control and monitor the flow of traffic between the different segments, and to implement different security policies for each segment.

For example, the management environment could be segmented from the storage replication environment, and only specific traffic, such as management traffic, would be allowed to flow between the two segments. This can help to protect the management environment from potential security threats that may originate from the storage replication environment.

Other options like firewall rules, VM anti-affinity rules, and different storage containers can also help to secure network traffic, but network segmentation provides a more comprehensive and granular way to secure the traffic between different environments.

You can find more information on this topic in the Nutanix Security Configuration Guide, which is available on the Nutanix support website: https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/docs/details?targetId=Security-Guide-v5_24:Security-Guide-v5_24

Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is a NIC-teaming configuration that balances network traffic based on source/destination IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports. LACP allows the administrator to configure multiple NICs as a single logical NIC, known as a Link Aggregation Group (LAG), which can increase the available bandwidth and provide redundancy. LACP uses a hashing algorithm to distribute traffic across the NICs in the LAG, based on the source and destination IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports. This ensures that traffic is evenly distributed across the NICs, which helps to improve overall network performance and availability. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v5_11:wc-network-configuring-uplink-ports_wc-network-configuring-uplink-ports.html

Labels allow administrators to group related objects, such as VMs, and then apply policies to those labels, rather than having to manually apply the policy to each individual VM. This is the most efficient way for an administrator to apply a security policy to dozens of VMs. Reference: https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Platform-Administrator-Guide-v5_7:pag-sec-category-label-c.html

To compare the performance of multiple VMs on a Nutanix cluster, an administrator can use an Analysis Chart. Analysis Charts allow administrators to view and compare performance metrics for multiple entities, such as VMs, over time. This can help the administrator diagnose performance issues by comparing the performance of the slow and unresponsive VM to other VMs on the cluster

A vDisk is a file that is stored on storage devices owned by a CVM. A vDisk represents a virtual disk that is attached to a VM or a CVM. A Storage Pool is a logical grouping of physical disks in a cluster. An Extent Group is a collection of data blocks that belong to a vDisk. A Container is a logical grouping of vDisks that share the same storage policies and settings. References: https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/misc/ebg-nca-6-5.pdf (pages 31-32)

Administrators can use recovery plans to specify groups of virtual machines and assign them to a destination for disaster recovery using Leap. Reference: Nutanix Certified Associate 6.5 Exam Study Guide, page 56

Categories enable Image Placement Policies to be mapped to target clusters by defining a set of key-value pairs that can be applied to clusters, hosts, or VMs. Categories can be used to control where images are replicated and stored. References: https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/misc/ebg-nca-6-5.pdf (page 23)