NCSE-Core Nutanix Certified Systems Engineer-Core (NCSE-Core 6.8) Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

To address the VP of Applications' initiative to transform IT from a cost center to a business enabler, the following key benefits should be reviewed:

On-Premises Cloud-Like Experience:

Benefit: Nutanix provides an infrastructure that delivers a cloud-like experience on-premises. This includes easy scalability, high availability, and efficient resource utilization, which helps in reducing the time and expenses related to meeting business deliverables.

Impact: This transformation ensures rapid deployment and management of applications, which in turn enhances business agility and reduces the dependency on slow IT response times.

Self-Service Portal:

Benefit: Nutanix offers a native and integrated Self-Service Portal that allows developers and business units to provision and manage resources on demand. This capability is crucial for reducing shadow IT and controlling unplanned spending on public cloud services.

Impact: By providing an easy-to-use, scalable portal, developers can quickly respond to business needs, reducing the time to market for new opportunities and innovations.

References:

Nutanix Documentation on Self-Service Portal and Cloud-Like Experience.

Nutanix Customer Success Stories on Transforming IT.

For network switch discovery in Prism, the following settings are required:

Switch Management IP Address: This is necessary to access and manage the network switch.

AHV Host IP address: This helps in identifying the hosts connected to the network.

SNMP Community Name: This is used for SNMP protocol to monitor and manage the network devices​​​​.

Nutanix clusters can use software encryption for data protection regardless of the underlying hardware configuration. Software encryption is implemented at the software level and provides flexibility as it does not depend on specific hardware features like self-encrypting drives (SEDs). This allows for consistent data encryption across different hardware platforms.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Nutanix Security Best Practices

B. Defined and measurable success criteria:

Before proceeding with a Proof of Concept (POC), it is crucial to establish defined and measurable success criteria. This ensures that both the SE and the prospect have a clear understanding of what constitutes a successful evaluation.

Success criteria provide a benchmark to measure the performance, functionality, and benefits of Nutanix in the prospect's environment. It helps in objectively assessing the POC outcomes and making an informed decision.

Without clear success criteria, the POC could lack direction, and the results might be open to interpretation, leading to potential disagreements and an inconclusive evaluation.

Problem Analysis:

The customer requires Disaster Recovery (DR) resources with an RPO of 6 hours.

The "Protect VMs and other Entities" setting is enabled, and Async is selected for the RPO.

Required Options:

Disaster Recovery: Must be enabled to configure and utilize DR resources for protecting VMs and other entities.

Remote Snapshot: Needs to be enabled to facilitate asynchronous replication and meet the specified RPO of 6 hours.

Explanation:

Disaster Recovery: Ensures that DR capabilities are available in the Sizer Scenario for the necessary failover and failback processes.

Remote Snapshot: Allows for creating remote snapshots at the required intervals to meet the 6-hour RPO, providing consistent and timely backups.

Outcome:

Enabling both Disaster Recovery and Remote Snapshot options will ensure the Sizer creates a DR cluster that meets the customer's RPO requirements.

References: For detailed steps and configurations, refer to Nutanix Sizer documentation and DR configuration guides.

In Nutanix Files (formerly known as Acropolis File Services or AFS) 3.5, home shares require a multi-FSVM deployment to function correctly. A single FSVM deployment does not support the configuration of home shares.

Single FSVM Limitation: A single FSVM deployment lacks the necessary redundancy and performance capabilities required for supporting home shares. Home shares require multiple FSVMs to provide high availability and load balancing, which is essential for managing user home directories effectively.

Home Shares Configuration: Home shares are designed to distribute user data across multiple nodes to ensure availability and performance. This distribution requires at least three FSVMs in a typical deployment setup.

Troubleshooting: When home shares cannot be configured, one of the first checks is to ensure that the deployment consists of the required number of FSVMs. In this case, the deployment having only a single FSVM directly explains the issue.

References:

Nutanix Bible, Section on File Services and Multi-FSVM requirements​​.

Nutanix-NDB-User-Guide, Network Requirements for Nutanix File Deployments​​.

Understanding the Need for a Centralized Gateway:

A centralized gateway provides a single point of access for all necessary resources, making it easier for customers and partners to manage their interactions with Nutanix.

Portal.nutanix.com:

Explanation: The portal.nutanix.com website is designed to be the single gateway for various Nutanix-related activities, including deal registrations, forums, software downloads, product documentation, product alerts, and support interactions.

Evaluating the Situation:

The prospect has concerns about AHV due to FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) and requires further validation despite a demo and case studies.

Additional Options to Address FUD:

X-Ray:

Explanation: X-Ray is a Nutanix tool designed to simulate real-world scenarios and workloads, providing automated and comprehensive testing to validate the performance and capabilities of AHV.

A. Multi-Site Management:

Nutanix provides centralized management of multiple sites through Prism Central, which allows for efficient management and monitoring of the main datacenter and the 25 satellite offices from a single interface. This reduces operational overhead and complexity.

B. Pay as you grow:

Nutanix's "Pay as you grow" model allows the prospect to start small and expand their infrastructure incrementally as their needs and budget allow. This model is ideal for environments with budget constraints and ensures that the infrastructure can scale with the business’s growth.

References:

Nutanix documentation and resources on Prism Central and the pay-as-you-grow model provide detailed explanations on how these features support multi-site management and scalable infrastructure.

When setting up Acropolis File Service (AFS) for the first time on a Nutanix cluster, the system creates three file services VMs by default. These VMs are distributed across different nodes in the cluster to ensure high availability and load balancing of the file services.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Nutanix Community Edition Getting Started Guide​

To evaluate the performance impact of failing a node while running workloads on the cluster, the systems engineer should use X-Ray, Nutanix's benchmarking and testing tool.

X-Ray Overview: X-Ray is a comprehensive tool designed to simulate various failure scenarios and measure their impact on performance. It is specifically built for testing Nutanix clusters.

Failing a Node: The tool can simulate node failures and provide detailed metrics on how the cluster and workloads are affected.

Performance Metrics: X-Ray provides insights into performance degradation, recovery times, and overall cluster resilience under failure conditions.

References:

Nutanix X-Ray Documentation: Detailed instructions and capabilities of X-Ray for simulating failures.

Nutanix Community: User experiences and best practices for using X-Ray.

Stargate is the CVM service responsible for providing storage to the hypervisor. It manages I/O operations, handles data distribution, replication, deduplication, compression, and other storage-related tasks. Stargate ensures that data is read and written efficiently, maintaining high performance and reliability within the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF).

References:

Nutanix Bible

Nutanix and SAP Partnership:

Explanation: Nutanix is recognized as a SAP Global Technology Partner, indicating a strong, collaborative relationship with SAP for providing integrated solutions.

In an 8-node hybrid cluster configured with a Fault Tolerance level of 2 (RF3), the system can tolerate up to two simultaneous failures. However, if there are SSD failures on two different nodes and a CVM is powered off on another node simultaneously, the data availability is compromised. This combination results in losing the quorum necessary for maintaining data availability and integrity, leading to VM data becoming unavailable.

References:

Nutanix Bible

Scenario Analysis:

The customer does not have access to vCenter or ESXi hosts on ACME Public Cloud.

ACME replicates copies of virtual disks to external storage.

Migration Feasibility:

Without access to vCenter or ESXi, tools like Xtract for VMs cannot directly access and migrate the VMs.

Nutanix Community Edition would not be feasible as it cannot replicate VMs directly without vCenter access.

Calm is used for automation and orchestration but not for direct VM migration from unsupported platforms.

Best Method:

Using the replicated VM copies on external storage provides a direct and viable migration path.

Import the VMs from external storage to the local Nutanix cluster, ensuring a smooth transition.

References:

Nutanix documentation on VM migration strategies.

Best practices for migrating VMs from external storage to Nutanix clusters.

In the provided scenario, to meet the performance requirements and avoid any reduction in performance of the web servers, the systems engineer needs to adjust the CPU configuration. By switching to manual sizing and changing the CPUs of the node configuration to a dual 10 core model, the CPU resources will be sufficient to handle the workload without performance degradation​

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.

A. Gartner Magic Quadrant:

The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a well-recognized industry report that evaluates technology vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. It is a credible source that highlights Nutanix’s position as a leader in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market.

Highlighting Nutanix’s leadership position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant can help address the management’s concerns about Nutanix’s market presence and reinforce its credibility as a major player in the HCI space.