NCP-EUC Nutanix Certified Professional - End User Computing (NCP-EUC) 6.10 Exam Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Nutanix AHV Plug-In for Citrix Director provides more information on Citrix generated desktops running on Nutanix AHV. Some of the metrics that are available in customized reports are:

VM CPU Usage

VM Memory Usage

VM Disk IOPS

VM Disk Bandwidth

one of the factors that affects end-user performance in a virtual desktop environment is network latency, which is the time it takes for data packets to travel between two points on a network.

Therefore, if the company wants to optimize end-user performance, they should choose a public cloud data center location that minimizes the network latency between the end user and the data center.

For non-persistent VDI environments where speed and personalization are required, Container-based profiles (such as FSLogix Profile Containers or Citrix Profile Management containers) are the industry standard and Nutanix recommended solution.

Unlike Roaming Profiles (Option D), which must copy thousands of files over the network at login (causing slow logins and "bloat"), Container-based profiles encapsulate the entire user profile into a single virtual disk (VHD/VHDX). This disk is mounted instantly over the network when the user logs in. This provides the user with their personalized settings immediately—mimicking a local profile—without the performance penalty of file copying, ensuring the fast and consistent sign-in experience requested by management.

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

According to Nutanix Move and Citrix/VDI Master Image Preparation guides:

The Process: When Nutanix Move migrates a VM from ESXi to AHV, it installs Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) (including VirtIO drivers) on the target VM to ensure it boots and functions correctly on the AHV hypervisor.

The Issue: If this migrated VM is intended to be a Base Image (Gold Image) for a non-persistent pool (MCS/PVS), the NGT instance installed by Move contains specific identity information (VM UUIDs/communication certificates) unique to that single VM.

The Requirement: If you clone this image without cleaning up, every clone will attempt to use the same NGT identity, causing communication conflicts with the cluster.

The Solution: The administrator must Remove NGT (or run the NGT cleanup interaction) after the conversion (once the VM is on AHV) and before reprovisioning (before sealing the image and creating clones). This ensures the clones can register as unique entities.

AHV Xi PC plug-in is used for when Prism Central resides in Xi Cloud. Prism Central is a management plane that provides centralized control and visibility across multiple Nutanix clusters and clouds. Xi Cloud is a hybrid cloud platform that enables customers to run their applications and workloads on Nutanix infrastructure in public cloud environments such as AWS and Azure2. The AHV Xi PC plug-in allows customers to use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with Nutanix AHV clusters running on Xi Cloud3.

https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/support/ebg-ncp-euc-6.pdf

https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv

https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/new-x-play-actions-in-prism-central-2021-7-40005

The Prism Central Playbook Action is a tool that allows you to automate tasks based on triggers, such as events, alerts, or webhooks. You can define a series of actions (called a playbook) that perform operations on your infrastructure, such as adding or reducing resources on a VM2.

To use the Playbook Action for VMs, you need to meet some prerequisites, such as:

The Prism Central version must be 2020.11 or later.

The AOS version must be 5.15 LTSR or later.

The hypervisor must be AHV or ESXi.

The VMs must have Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) installed and enabled3.

One of the possible reasons why the Playbook Action is no longer being triggered is that the virtual desktop CPU Usage alerts were not cleared. According to the Prism Central guide3, “If an alert has been triggered once and has not been cleared yet, then it will not trigger any action again until it has been cleared”. Therefore, if the CPU Usage alert remains active for a virtual desktop, it will prevent the Playbook Action from adding more vCPUs to it.

The performance issue is caused by Host CPU overcommitment, specifically regarding CPU scheduling (Ready Time) rather than total utilization.

While the Host CPU utilization is below 80% (meaning the processor has idle cycles), the configuration of 8 vCPUs per VM combined with a high 9:1 vCPU-to-pCPU ratio creates a bottleneck known as "Co-stop" or high "CPU Ready" time. The hypervisor scheduler must wait until 8 physical cores are available simultaneously to execute a single clock cycle for one VM. In a dense VDI environment, finding 8 free cores at the exact same moment is difficult, causing the VMs to pause (freeze) while waiting for the scheduler, even if the overall CPU usage of the host appears moderate. Reducing the vCPU count per VM would likely resolve the performance issues.

The default load balancing configuration in Nutanix AHV is Balance-SLB (Source Load Balancing). This setting utilizes all available uplinks by assigning VM traffic to specific uplinks based on source MAC address hashing. To optimize bandwidth usage, the Balance-SLB algorithm periodically evaluates link utilization and may rebalance traffic by moving a VM's assignment from one uplink to another.

According to Nutanix AHV Networking documentation, this rebalancing action involves sending a gratuitous ARP (RARP) to update the physical switch. During this split-second transition, real-time sensitive traffic—such as streaming video or VoIP—may experience dropped packets or out-of-order delivery, resulting in symptoms like "hung/frozen display frames." For environments prioritizing connection consistency over aggregate bandwidth for single VMs (like VDI with streaming requirements), Active-Backup is often recommended to eliminate the potential for rebalancing interruptions. (Note: Option A is a VMware ESXi terminology, not AHV).

To support non-disruptive operations for sensitive workloads such as VDI user profiles (e.g., FSLogix or Citrix Profile Management), Nutanix Files supports Continuous Availability (CA) for SMB shares.

Standard SMB shares may experience a brief pause or disconnect during an FSVM failover or upgrade (rolling reboot), which causes VDI profile containers to detach, leading to application crashes or session hangs. Continuous Availability enables persistent file handles, allowing the client session to transparently failover to another FSVM node without disconnecting the application or user session. This is the specific feature designed to address connectivity issues during maintenance windows for VDI workloads.

one of the possible Nutanix storage efficiency features that the administrator can use for this solution is Deduplication. Deduplication is a technology that eliminates duplicate blocks of data and reduces storage consumption. 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 Machine Creation Services (MCS) or Provisioning Services (PVS)1.

To resolve issues with persistence (retaining settings) and login performance in a non-persistent VDI environment, the industry standard and Nutanix-recommended solution is to Enable a Virtual Disk-based profile solution (such as FSLogix Profile Containers or Citrix Profile Management containers).

Retaining Settings: Unlike local profiles (wiped on reboot) or mandatory profiles (read-only), containerized profiles capture all user writes and persist them to a VHD/VHDX file on a file share (e.g., Nutanix Files).

Speed: Microsoft Roaming Profiles (Option A) require copying files over the network at login, causing slowness. Virtual Disk-based solutions mount the profile disk instantly over the network, making the login process nearly as fast as a local profile while ensuring data persistence.

Nutanix Files VDI Sync is a feature originally designed for active-active use cases where users might access data from either site, requiring bidirectional metadata scanning and locking. This process is resource-intensive.

For a Disaster Recovery (DR) purpose where the secondary site is passive (users only access it if the primary fails), full active-active bidirectional synchronization is unnecessary and wasteful. To reduce the high CPU and RAM utilization caused by the constant metadata comparison between sites, the administrator should configure one-way synchronization (or leverage standard Async DR protection). This ensures data replicates to the DR site without the overhead of checking the DR site for changes to replicate back to the source.

According to Nutanix and Microsoft best practices for Windows 11 on AHV, the operating system has significantly higher CPU overhead compared to previous versions due to mandatory security features like Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI).

While the minimum requirement for Windows 11 is 2 vCPUs, this configuration is often insufficient for an acceptable user experience in a VDI environment where users are running concurrent applications. Performance analysis indicates that 2 vCPUs results in high CPU Ready time and sluggishness. The recommended configuration to resolve these performance bottlenecks is to increase the CPU allocation to at least 3 vCPUs (typically 4 vCPUs is the standard "sweet spot" for Windows 11 VDI), ensuring enough compute cycles are available for both the OS overhead and user workloads.3

According to the Nutanix Security Guide, Cluster Lockdown is the specific security feature designed to restrict access to the cluster by disabling password-based authentication. When Cluster Lockdown is enabled, the cluster allows access only via SSH keys (RSA keys).

To meet the requirement of allowing access from "selected workstations" while "disallowing password access," the administrator must use Cluster Lockdown. By generating an SSH key pair and configuring the public key within the Cluster Lockdown settings (and removing the "Enable Remote Login with Password" option), the administrator ensures that only workstations possessing the corresponding private key can authenticate. This effectively restricts access to the specific workstations holding the keys and eliminates the risk associated with password-based logins. While IP restrictions (Option B/C) can limit the source addresses, they do not inherently disable password authentication, which is the primary requirement of the question.

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.

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

Based on the provided exhibit and Nutanix Prism Central administration guides:

Interface Identification: The screenshot displays the Prism Central web console, indicated by the "Infrastructure" dropdown menu in the top navigation bar (Prism Element uses a different layout). The user is currently in the Images dashboard (Infrastructure > Compute > Images).

Updating Image Metadata: To rename an image (or modify its description/type) in Prism Central, the standard workflow is to select the target image (as shown with "Windows-11" selected) and use the Actions menu.

The "Update" Action: Within the Actions dropdown menu, the correct option to modify existing settings is Update. Clicking Actions -> Update opens the "Update Image" dialog box, where the Name field is editable.

Incorrect Options:

A & D (CLI): These are incorrect because image renaming is fully supported in the UI; the CLI (acli or ncli) is available but not mandatory ("must" is the error).

C (Clone): Cloning an image creates a duplicate copy. While this could result in a new image with a new name, it is an inefficient workaround rather than the direct solution for simply renaming an existing image.

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

According to the Nutanix AHV Administration Guide and Cluster Expansion prerequisites for environments with non-default virtual switches:

Manual Bridge Configuration: When a cluster has multiple virtual switches (e.g., vs1, vs2) configured, these correspond to specific OVS bridges (e.g., br1, br2) on the AHV hosts. Before adding new nodes to such a cluster, the administrator must manually configure these additional bridges on the new nodes to match the existing cluster configuration.

Consistency Requirement: The documentation states that virtual bridges used for a virtual switch (VS) on all nodes must have the same specification (name, MTU, uplink bond type). If vs1 is mapped to br1 on existing nodes, it must be mapped to br1 on the new nodes before they are added to the cluster.

Expansion Failure/Warning: Failure to configure these bridges prior to expansion can result in the new nodes being unable to join the configured networks properly or the expansion process failing checks related to network uniformity.