Nutanix Certified Professional - Multicloud Infrastructure v6.5 Exam

The only option that requires iSCSI initiator configuration in the guest OS to use Volumes is Microsoft Windows Failover Cluster.Volumes is an enterprise-class, software-defined block storage solution that exposes storage resources directly to virtualized guest operating systems or physical hosts using the iSCSI protocol7. To use Volumes, customers need to configure iSCSI initiators on their hosts or guest OSes. However, some applications or services can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators when running on AHV VMs. These include:

SQL Server Always On Availability Group: This is a high availability and disaster recovery solution for SQL Server databases that uses Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and Availability Groups (AGs) as its core components. When running on AHV VMs, SQL Server Always On Availability Group can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.

Oracle RAC: This is a clustered database system that provides high availability and scalability for Oracle databases. When running on AHV VMs, Oracle RAC can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.

Exchange DAG: This is a group of up to 16 mailbox servers that hosts a set of databases and provides automatic database-level recovery from failures that affect individual servers or databases. When running on AHV VMs, Exchange DAG can use native storage adapters instead of iSCSI initiators.

According to the Nutanix Volumes - Recommendations And Best Practices web search result3, two actions that the administrator should take when designing the Volume Group are:

Distribute workload across multiple virtual disks: Use multiple disks rather than a single large disk for an application. Consider using a minimum of one disk per Nutanix node to distribute the workload across all nodes in a cluster. Multiple disks per Nutanix node may also improve an application's performance. For performance-intensive environments, we recommend using between four and eight disks per CVM for a given workload.

Enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling): Receive-side scaling (RSS) allows the system to use multiple CPUs for network activity. With RSS enabled, multiple CPU cores process network traffic, preventing a single CPU core from becoming a bottleneck. Enabling RSS within hosts can be beneficial for heavy iSCSI workloads. For VMs running in ESXi environments, RSS requires VMXNET3 VNICs. For Hyper-V environments, enable VMQ to take full advantage of Virtual RSS.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result3, advertised capacity is an advanced container setting that allows the administrator to reserve an advertised storage space for a storage container. An advertised capacity setting gives the hypervisor a maximum storage size that the storage container can use. This setting can be any arbitrary value greater than or equal to the resiliency required. The hypervisor ensures that the storage container storage doesn't go beyond the advertised capacity. If the administrator wants a container to be displayed and limited to 1TB in the hypervisor, they should set the advertised capacity to 1TB.

According to the Nutanix Support & Insights web search result3, shadow clones are vDisk copies that are created by the cluster when a vDisk is read by multiple VMs. Shadow clones are immutable copies of a vDisk that are stored in different nodes in the cluster, and are used to improve read performance and reduce network traffic. Shadow clones are automatically created and deleted by the cluster, based on the demand and availability of resources.

A Compute Only node is a node that does not have any local storage devices and only provides compute resources to the cluster2.A Compute Only node does not run a CVM, but instead relies on the CVMs of other nodes to access the distributed storage fabric2