Pass the Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) NCP-EUC Questions and answers with Dumpstech

Storage Efficiency features that will provide better storage efficiency and performance improvement for a mix of full clones and non-persistent desktops deployed via Citrix MCS on a three-node cluster are Compression and Deduplication. Compression is a technology that reduces the size of data blocks by removing redundant information. Deduplication is a technology that eliminates duplicate blocks of data and reduces storage consumption. Both Compression and Deduplication can be enabled on a per-container basis and can provide significant savings for Citrix virtual desktop deployments that use cloning technologies such as MCS2.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Nutanix End User Computing documents:

According to Nutanix VDI Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning best practices:

Symptom Analysis: "Sluggish mouse and keyboard response" is a classic symptom of high CPU contention or high Latency on the host or VM. Since the environment was previously stable ("No additional virtual desktops added") and the change was "dramatic," it points to a new process consuming resources unexpectedly.

The "Agent" Factor: In non-persistent VDI environments, a common cause for sudden performance degradation affecting an "entire department" is an Antivirus or Security Agent running a scheduled scan or a signature update simultaneously across all clones. This creates a "storm" of IOPS and CPU usage (often called an AV storm), starving the user sessions of the resources needed for basic input processing (mouse/keyboard).

Why not others?

Unoptimized master image (B): This would cause poor performance from day one, not a "dramatic change" after 60 days of stability.

Legacy drivers (C): Drivers do not degrade suddenly; they would cause issues from the time of installation.

Over-provisioning (D): This usually results in gradual degradation as user concurrency increases, not a sudden cliff-edge drop in performance if user counts haven't changed.

For Virtual Machine operations involving vGPUs (NVIDIA GRID) on Nutanix AHV, it is a strict requirement that all GPU nodes must run the same version of the host driver.

To support VM mobility, live migration, and High Availability (HA) within the cluster, the source and destination hosts must have compatible GPU profiles and identical driver versions. If drivers are mismatched between nodes, the GPU state cannot be successfully transferred or re-initialized, preventing migration and potentially causing VM power-on failures. While a cluster can contain a subset of nodes with GPUs (heterogeneous cluster), the nodes that do have GPUs must be uniform in their driver configuration.

A cloud-based DR service that allows customers to protect their Nutanix workloads in a Nutanix-owned cloud platform6. Xi Leap eliminates the need for multiple products and provides end-to-end security, automation, and SLA compliance6.

According to Nutanix "Security Log Configuration" and "Prism Central" best practices, configuring syslog monitoring via the Prism Central (PC) web console automatically propagates the configuration to all registered Prism Element clusters. This is designed for centralized management but violates the requirement for cluster-specific servers.

To configure a syslog server for a specific cluster without propagating the setting to other clusters, the administrator must use the Nutanix Command-Line Interface (nCLI) on the specific cluster (Prism Element). Documentation explicitly states: "Use the Nutanix command-line interface (nCLI) for syslog monitoring configuration to avoid propagating the configuration to the clusters."

To install the NVIDIA GRID host driver (vGPU driver) on a Nutanix AHV cluster, the administrator must upload the driver file (typically an RPM) to a Controller VM (CVM). From the CVM, the correct procedure is to use the install_host_package command.

This specific Nutanix utility pushes the installation package to the AHV hosts and executes the installation process. The typical syntax is install_host_package -r , which ensures the driver is correctly applied to the hypervisor layer across the cluster nodes. allssh or hostssh commands with standard Linux package managers (like yum) are not the supported method for applying hypervisor-level drivers in AHV.

 Nutanix recommends using separate containers for persistent and non-persistent VMS. For persistent VMS, enable compression and deduplication. For non-persistent VMS, enable compression only1

According to Nutanix documentation, it is recommended to use multiple containers, with each container representing an individual performance workload. This allows for better performance isolation and easier management. For example, one container could be used for VDI workloads, while another container could be used for general-purpose workloads.

As for compression and deduplication, it is recommended to enable them for all VMs. Compression reduces the amount of storage space required and increases the performance of the system, while deduplication reduces the amount of duplicate data stored on the system. Erasure coding can also be used as an alternative to replication for data protection.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Nutanix End User Computing documents:

According to Citrix on Nutanix Best Practices for Profile Management:

Legacy Roaming Profiles: A "Legacy Roaming Profile" (Windows Roaming User Profiles) functions by downloading the entire profile (files, folders, AppData, etc.) from the network share to the local VM at logon, and uploading changes back at logoff.

Impact on Performance: If a user has a large existing profile (common in legacy migrations), this copy process creates massive network and disk I/O activity during the logon/logoff phase, resulting in extended wait times (the "Applying User Settings" or "Waiting for User Profile Service" screens).

Contrast with Modern Solutions: Modern VDI solutions use Profile Containers (like FSLogix or Citrix Profile Management containers) which mount the profile as a virtual disk (VHDX) almost instantly, rather than copying files.

Why not Home Folder (C)? A home folder is typically a mapped network drive. It does not copy data to the desktop at logon; it simply maps a pointer. Therefore, having "too much data" in a mapped drive does not slow down the logon process itself.

To meet the requirements of minimizing operational overhead and optimizing hardware resources while ensuring N+1 availability, Option B is the optimal design.

Operational Overhead: Managing two clusters (Option B) creates significantly less administrative burden (upgrades, lifecycle management, failure domains) than managing four clusters (Options C and D).

Resource Optimization & Availability:

Total Load: 64TB of RAM (4,000 VMs * 16GB).

Option B (Correct): 2 Clusters × 32 Nodes = 64 Total Nodes.

Per Cluster: 32 nodes × 1.5TB = 48TB Total RAM.

Required RAM per cluster (2,000 VMs): 32TB.

N+1 Check: If 1 node fails, available RAM is 46.5TB. (46.5TB > 32TB required). This validates redundancy with fewer physical nodes (64) compared to Option D (72 nodes).

Option A: Fails N+1. (32 nodes × 1TB = 32TB. If 1 node fails, 31TB available < 32TB required).

Option D: Uses 72 nodes (higher hardware count/cost) and 4 clusters (higher overhead), making it less optimal than B.

In the terminology of Flow Network Security Next-Gen (FNS NG), the components are defined as follows:

Security Policy Model: Defined as "A schema of policies for specifying and enforcing a desired behavior.4 A Policy Model will have one or more policies."5 This model provides the framework (such as Application, Isolation, or Quarantine) within which specific policies are created.

Security Policy: Defined as a "collection of security rules and assets [entities, endpoints, categories, applications, etc.] on which the rules have to be enforced together."6

Therefore, the function that acts as the overarching schema and contains "one or more policies" is the Security Policy Model.7