In Nutanix Calm/Prism Central Self-Service, “macros” are run-time substitution tokens that the Calm engine replaces with the resolved value of a variable, credential, runtime input, or system field. The documented syntax encloses the variable name between two leading and two trailing “at” signs: @@{varname}@@. Any other bracketing or the omission of the double “at” signs prevents the engine from recognising the token; the value will not be substituted.

A. @{varname}@ – Uses only single “@” at each side; Calm parser requires double.

B. {varname} – Missing the required “@” delimiters entirely.

C. [[varname]] – Square-bracket notation is not recognised in Calm/Self-Service macros.

1. Nutanix, “Calm 3.6 Administration Guide – Using Macros in Tasks,” Section 6.3, p. 181: “The macro must be written as @@{variablename}@@ for the engine to render the run-time value.”

2. Nutanix, “Prism Central Self-Service Admin Guide v6.10,” Ch. 5 ‘Run-Time Variables and Macros,’ p. 102: “Syntax: @@{NAME}@@; example: echo @@{tier1ip}@@.”

3. Nutanix University, “NCP-MCA v6.10 Courseware – Module 4: Calm Blueprints,” slide 42: “Macro format: @@{varname}@@ (double ‘@’ prefix and suffix).”

The only Prism Central automation that can selectively suppress Info and Warning NGT alerts yet leave Critical alerts visible is an Alert-Matching-Criteria playbook.

When you create a playbook with trigger type “Alert – Matching Criteria”, you can filter on

• Alert name = “Nutanix Guest Tools …”, and

• Severity = Info OR Warning.

The action “Acknowledge Alert” is then executed automatically, auto-clearing those two severities, while Critical alerts—which do not meet the match filter—continue to surface to the administrator.

B. Manual playbook requires a human click; it does not execute automatically, so Info/Warning alerts would still appear until someone runs the playbook.

C. “Alert-based for specific NGT Alerts” targets individual alert UUIDs; it cannot apply a severity filter, forcing separate playbooks per alert and risking suppression of Critical alerts.

D. NGT issues generate Alerts, not Events; an event-triggered playbook would never fire for the desired conditions.

1. Nutanix Prism Central Guide 2023.1, Automation with Playbooks → “Create an Alert-Matching Criteria-Based Playbook”, Steps 3-5 (filter by Alert Name and Severity; select action Acknowledge Alert).

2. Nutanix Prism Central Guide 2023.1, Table “Playbook Trigger Types” – distinguishes Alert triggers from Event triggers.

3. Nutanix Guest Tools Alert Definitions, Nutanix Support Portal KB #30402, section “Severity levels generated by NGT”.

Nutanix Calm provides the macro @@{calmunique}@@, which expands to a system-generated character string that is guaranteed to be unique every time the blueprint is launched. By concatenating the static prefix “WNSRV” with @@{calmunique}@@ the developer assures that every VM name produced by repeated QA pipeline executions is distinct, eliminating any possibility of a naming collision during deployment.

A. @@{calmrandom}@@ only returns a random string; duplicates, although unlikely, are not prevented.

B. Static value “WNSRV0001” would collide on every subsequent run.

D. Two @@{calmrandom}@@ strings reduce—but do not eliminate—the chance of collision; uniqueness is still not guaranteed.

1. Nutanix Calm Administration Guide 6.5, “Using Macros”, Table 30-2 – calmunique: “…returns a unique 6-character string…recommended for naming to avoid collisions.” (pp. 211-212).

2. Nutanix Calm Blueprint Design Guide 3.4, Section 4.2 “Name Macros”: “calmrandom is random only; calmunique guarantees uniqueness across launches.” (p. 27).

3. Nutanix University NCP-MCA v6.10 Courseware, Module 5 “Self-Service Blueprints”, slide 18: “Use calmunique for VM names when repeated automation runs must never collide.”

Playbooks store a full run-history that records every trigger evaluation and the resulting action status. Nutanix documentation recommends examining this History tab first when a playbook does not appear to run—it confirms whether the trigger fired, if conditions were met, and why an action may have been skipped or failed. Therefore, validating the configuration is best started by reviewing the playbook’s execution history rather than changing project context, quotas, or rebooting Prism Central.

A. Execution context need not be moved to Prism Element; power-off VM actions execute perfectly from Prism Central, so changing context will not validate trigger issues.

B. Prism Central changes are applied immediately; rebooting is unnecessary and gives no diagnostic insight into why a playbook failed to run.

C. Resource quotas affect VM provisioning, not whether an automation playbook trigger fires; increasing CPU/memory limits will not influence playbook execution.

1. Nutanix Prism Central Administration Guide 6.10, “Automation – Viewing Playbook Execution History,” pp. 127-129: explains using the History tab to verify trigger evaluations.

2. Nutanix University, NCP-MCA v6.10 Courseware Module “Playbooks & X-Play,” Section “Troubleshooting Playbooks,” slide 14: instructs to check Execution History first when playbooks do not run.

3. Nutanix Official Documentation Portal, KB-7525 “Playbooks – Troubleshooting Basics,” Step 1: “Inspect the History tab to confirm the trigger fired and review error details.”

In Calm blueprints a variable marked as Secret is stored in CredHub encrypted and is automatically masked (shown as ) whenever its value is printed in task output or audit logs, including Set-Variable tasks. By converting the variable to a Secret type the sensitive data is no longer exposed, while the blueprint can still reference the variable at run-time.

A. “=secret=” syntax is not recognised by Calm; the platform relies on the Secret variable flag, not a value prefix.

B. Calm is expressly designed to manage sensitive data through Secret variables and credentials; eliminating blueprints is unnecessary.

D. @@{jsonEncode(value)}@@ only produces a JSON-escaped string; it does not encrypt or mask log output.

1. Nutanix Calm 6.5 Administration Guide – “Variables > Secret Variables”, p.103-104: “If Secret is enabled the value is stored encrypted and will be masked in audit or run-time logs.”

2. Nutanix Calm 6.5 Administration Guide – “Viewing Audit Logs”, p.182: “Secret variable values appear as in Set-Variable task output.”

3. Nutanix Calm 3.6 API & CLI Reference – Section 4.2 “CredHub integration for secret variables”.

4. Nutanix University NCP-MCA v6 Courseware – Module 4, Slide 15: “Use Secret variables to prevent sensitive data from appearing in Calm logs.”

In Nutanix Calm, administrators design automation blueprints and then “Publish” them to the Calm Marketplace. Publishing makes the blueprint visible to, and launchable by, authorized self-service users in their projects. The feature name used in product literature for this publishing and catalog capability is “Marketplace and Application Management,” therefore option B directly addresses the ability to publish blueprints for consumption.

A. Unified Multi-Cloud Orchestration – governs provisioning to different clouds; it does not provide the catalog/ publishing mechanism.

C. Application Development and Modernization – focuses on integrating Calm with CI/CD and modern stacks, not on blueprint publication.

D. Self-Service DSL – Infrastructure-as-Code – refers to the Calm DSL used to define blueprints in code, but it does not expose or publish them to consumers.

1. Nutanix Calm Administration Guide v6.5, “Publishing a Blueprint to the Marketplace,” pp. 163-165.

2. Nutanix Prism Central Guide 2023.1, Section “Calm Marketplace,” para. 1-2 (explains blueprints appear to end-users only after being published).

3. Nutanix Calm 3.2 Tech Note, “Blueprint Marketplace & Self-Service,” p. 4 (describes Marketplace as the consumption layer for published blueprints).

In Self-Service, a Project is an administrative construct that groups together one or more users, assigns them roles, and confines their consumption of infrastructure through quotas and RBAC policies. The Project itself has no function for Prism Central alerting, VM migration, or binding blueprints/runbooks to clusters; those tasks belong to other Prism Central or Calm features. Hence only option A reflects an actual capability of Projects in Self-Service.

B. Projects neither receive nor display hardware alerts; alert monitoring is done from the Prism Central Operations console.

C. VM migration automation is supplied by Nutanix Move or Leap, not by Self-Service Projects.

D. Blueprints and runbooks are associated with Projects, not directly with clusters; Projects cannot “assign” them to clusters.

1. Nutanix Prism Central Guide v6.5, “Self-Service > Projects,” pp. 463-465: “A project groups users, provides role-based access, and sets quotas for compute, storage, and network resources.”

2. Nutanix Calm Admin Guide v3.6, “Projects,” p. 27: “Blueprints and runbooks belong to a project; clusters are added to the project’s infrastructure, not vice-versa.”

3. Nutanix Prism Central Operations and Alerts Guide v6.5, “Alerts Overview,” p. 12: alerts are managed outside the Self-Service Project construct.

To allow Self-Service Portal users to deploy blueprints to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the cloud account must first be registered as a “Provider.” In Prism Central 6.x, the administrator navigates to Administration → Self-Service → Providers and selects “Add Provider,” where OCI is listed together with AWS, Azure, and GCP. Only after a provider is added can it be attached to Projects or Environments for user access. Therefore, the configuration task is performed in the Providers section.

A. Marketplace – Used to browse/publish blueprints and runbooks; it does not register external clouds.

B. Environments – Allow blueprint scoping and variable definition but rely on already-configured providers.

C. Projects – Control RBAC, quotas, and cost governance; they consume, not create, provider definitions.

1. Nutanix Calm 6.5 Administration Guide, “Managing Providers,” pp. 24-26: “Select Self-Service > Providers, then click Add Provider to register AWS, Azure, GCP, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accounts.”

2. Nutanix Prism Central Guide 2023.1, Section “Self-Service Setup,” para. 3: “Before assigning a public cloud to a project, add it as a provider.”

3. Nutanix University Courseware: NCP-MCA 6.x “Module 7 – Self-Service,” slide 9: “Providers page is the single point to configure on-prem and public cloud endpoints (AWS, Azure, OCI, GCP).”

The only way to prove that the self-service Project mapping, the blueprint, and the post-deployment Playbook all interact correctly is to launch (test-deploy) the blueprint inside the Project and then view the Playbook execution status. This single action validates

1) that the Project’s credential, quota, and network mappings allow a deployment, and

2) that the Playbook is automatically triggered by the post-deploy task and completes successfully.

Running the Playbook by itself or reviewing cluster tasks does not confirm the end-to-end workflow that users will invoke.

A. Running the Playbook alone never tests blueprint triggers or Project resource mappings; it validates only the Playbook logic in isolation.

B. Prism Element task history records cluster operations, not Calm/X-Play execution; it cannot confirm Playbook trigger or success.

C. Moving the blueprint to another Project changes the environment and still requires a test deploy; comparison of usage offers no functional validation.

1. Nutanix Calm Administration Guide 3.6, “Creating and Testing Blueprints” pp. 138-140: “Use Test Deploy to launch the blueprint in its Project and verify post-deployment runbook execution before publishing.”

2. Nutanix Prism Central Admin Guide pc.2023.3, Chapter “Playbooks – Viewing Execution History”, p. 421: “After a blueprint deploy triggers a post-deployment Playbook, its status appears in Playbooks > History.”

3. Nutanix University Courseware “NCP-MCA v6.10: Automation and Orchestration”, Module 4, Slide 27: “Best practice—perform a test deployment of the blueprint to confirm Project mappings and Playbook execution prior to enabling self-service.”

In Calm/Prism Central the Self-Service Library does not permit creating stand-alone tasks.

A task first has to exist inside a Blueprint or Runbook.

When that Blueprint or Runbook is published, any task that has been marked “Save to Library” (or “Expose to Self-Service”) is automatically extracted and shown in Library ➔ Tasks for later reuse.

Therefore the only way a task can appear in the Library list is by publishing it from an existing Blueprint or Runbook.

A. The Library UI has no “Create Task” function; tasks are view-only once published.

B. Projects only control RBAC and quota; they are not used for uploading or registering tasks.

C. GitHub integration can import blueprints, not register individual tasks directly in the Library.

1. Nutanix Calm Administration & Operations Guide v3.6, “Self-Service Library → Task Library”, p.147-148: “Tasks become available in Library only after being published from a Blueprint or Runbook that contains them.”

2. Nutanix University – Multicloud Automation (MCA) Administration Courseware, Module 5 “Working with the Self-Service Library”, slide 18: “Publish Blueprint/Runbook → Tasks marked for Library appear under Library > Tasks.”

3. Nutanix Calm 3.7 User Guide, Section 7.4 “Publishing a Blueprint”, para 3: “Publishing extracts selectable tasks into the global Task Library for reuse.”

These sources collectively confirm that publishing from a Blueprint/Runbook is the sole method for a task to be listed in the Self-Service Library.