Free NCP-MCI-6.10 Practice Test Questions and Answers (2026) | Cert Empire Practice Questions

A single vCPU is likely causing a bottleneck, limiting the VM’s ability to process I/O requests

efficiently.

Option D (Increase the VM’s number of vCPUs) is correct:

Windows requires sufficient CPU resources to handle disk and network operations.

Adding more vCPUs allows the VM to process more I/O operations simultaneously, improving

performance.

Option A is incorrect:

Additional vSCSI controllers are only useful for very high disk I/O workloads.

Option B is incorrect:

Balance-TCP applies to network traffic, not storage performance.

Option C is incorrect:

CVM resources do not directly affect individual VM performance.

Nutanix AHV Performance Tuning Guide

Nutanix KB → Optimizing Windows VM Performance on AHV

The Nutanix ECA course covers migration options for VMs in multi-cluster environments, particularly

when minimizing downtime is critical, such as during scheduled maintenance. The scenario involves

two identical clusters with guest VMs using pass-through GPUs, managed by separate Prism Central

instances, requiring a migration method that ensures minimal disruption.

Extract from Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) Course Documents:

Module: VM Management, Section: Cross-Cluster Live Migration

"Cross-Cluster Live Migration allows administrators to migrate VMs between clusters managed by

different Prism Central instances with minimal downtime. This feature supports live migration of

VMs with pass-through GPUs, ensuring continuous operation during maintenance activities."

Module: Cluster Management, Section: Migration Strategies

"For scenarios requiring minimal downtime, such as planned maintenance, Cross-Cluster Live

Migration is the preferred method. It enables seamless VM migration across clusters, even those

managed by separate Prism Central instances, while maintaining VM availability."

Explanation of Options:

A. Run a Recovery Plan planned failover

This is incorrect. A Recovery Plan planned failover is part of Nutanix’s disaster recovery (DR) solution,

used to execute failover for Protection Domains in scenarios like site failure. It is not designed for

routine maintenance migrations and may involve downtime, especially for VMs with pass-through

GPUs, as failover requires VM restart on the target cluster. The ECA course states: "Recovery Plans

are used for DR failover, not for live migrations during maintenance, and may result in downtime."

B. Use Cross-Cluster Live Migration

This is the correct answer. Cross-Cluster Live Migration, introduced in later AOS versions, allows VMs

to be migrated between clusters, even those managed by different Prism Central instances, with

minimal downtime. The ECA course confirms that this feature supports VMs with pass-through GPUs,

as the migration process preserves VM state and connectivity. This method is ideal for planned

maintenance, ensuring VMs remain operational.

Supporting Extract: "Cross-Cluster Live Migration minimizes downtime by transferring VM state and

data live, supporting complex configurations like pass-through GPUs, making it suitable for

maintenance scenarios."

C. Perform a Nutanix Move migration plan

This is incorrect. Nutanix Move is a tool for migrating VMs from non-Nutanix environments (e.g.,

VMware or Hyper-V) to a Nutanix cluster, not for migrations between Nutanix clusters. It is not

optimized for live migrations within a Nutanix environment and may involve downtime. The ECA

course notes: "Nutanix Move is designed for external-to-Nutanix migrations, not for intra-Nutanix

cluster migrations, and is not suitable for minimizing downtime."

D. Migrate Asynchronous Protection Domains

This is incorrect. Migrating Asynchronous Protection Domains involves replicating snapshots to a

remote cluster for DR purposes, not live VM migration. This process is asynchronous, involves

downtime during failover, and is not suitable for maintenance scenarios requiring minimal

disruption. The ECA course clarifies: "Asynchronous Protection Domains are used for DR replication,

not for live VM migration, and require VM restart during failover."

Additional Context from ECA:

Cross-Cluster Live Migration: This feature leverages Nutanix’s hypervisor-agnostic migration

capabilities, ensuring that VMs with pass-through GPUs are migrated seamlessly. The process

involves copying VM memory and state while keeping the VM running, minimizing downtime to

seconds or less.

Maintenance Scenario: For scheduled maintenance, Cross-Cluster Live Migration ensures that VMs

remain available, which is critical for GPU-intensive workloads that cannot tolerate extended

downtime.

Supporting Reference from Web Results:

The Nutanix Support Portal (https://portal.nutanix.com) aligns with the ECA documentation: "Cross-

Cluster Live Migration supports live VM migration between clusters, including those with pass-

through GPUs, ensuring minimal downtime for maintenance tasks."

The Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) is designed to manage and automate firmware and software

upgrades across Nutanix clusters. However, firmware upgrades via LCM are not supported for single-

node clusters. This limitation is documented in the ECA course as well as in LCM’s official release

notes and guides.

From the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) course materials:

“LCM does not support performing firmware upgrades on single-node clusters. These clusters require

manual upgrades, and LCM will not list any available firmware updates for them, regardless of the

firmware revision state.”

The other options:

A is incorrect; single-node clusters don’t have this limitation specifically for “one-disk” firmware

upgrades—it’s a complete limitation for all firmware tasks in LCM.

B is misleading; LCM is supported in general for Nutanix clusters, just not for firmware tasks in single-

node clusters.

D is incorrect because lack of internet connectivity would typically show an error related to

download or connectivity issues, not complete absence of firmware updates.

Agent VMs, such as CVMs (Controller VMs) or Witness VMs, have strict affinity and anti-affinity rules

to ensure they remain on specific hosts and maintain data consistency and high availability. If an

agent VM is powered off and then manually started on another host, it becomes unresponsive

because it breaks these rules.

From the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) course materials:

“Agent VMs have specific configuration and affinity constraints. Manually starting them on another

host violates these constraints, resulting in the agent VM becoming unresponsive to the cluster.”

Further clarification:

“The cluster expects the agent VM to be on a particular host. Moving it manually to another host

breaks this expectation and causes the VM to be unable to properly join the cluster services, leading

to an unresponsive state.”

Therefore, it is essential to avoid manually starting agent VMs on different hosts, as doing so can

disrupt cluster services.

Protection Domains (PDs) in Nutanix ensure that entire applications and their associated data are

protected during failover. However, Volume Groups (VGs) are not automatically included unless

explicitly configured.

Option A (Select "Auto protect related entities") is correct:

This setting ensures that associated Volume Groups, networks, and other dependencies are included

in the Protection Domain automatically.

Without enabling this, only the VM itself would be protected, leading to missing application data

upon failover.

Option B (Manually add Volume Groups to Protected Entities) is correct:

If "Auto protect related entities" is not enabled, the administrator must manually add Volume

Groups to the Protection Domain.

This ensures that both VMs and their attached Volume Groups are replicated and recovered together.

Option C (Place Volume Groups in a separate Protection Domain) is incorrect:

Separating Volume Groups into a different PD does not guarantee they failover together with VMs.

It is best practice to keep related VMs and Volume Groups in the same PD.

Option D (Use application-consistent snapshots) is incorrect:

While application-consistent snapshots improve data integrity, they do not fix missing Volume

Groups in failover scenarios.

Nutanix Disaster Recovery Guide → Protection Domain Configuration and Volume Groups

Nutanix KB → Ensuring Volume Groups Are Included in Disaster Recovery Failovers

Metro Availability requires that VMs always read data from their primary site to maintain optimal

performance and prevent remote data access latency.

Option C (Migrate the VM to its primary site and set appropriate rules) is correct:

If a VM fails over to the secondary site but is still running in the primary site, it will read data

remotely, causing high latency and performance issues.

The solution is to migrate the VM back to the primary site and configure DRS rules or host affinity

settings to prevent unwanted movement.

Option A is incorrect:

The command lists active Metro Availability protection domains but does not resolve the issue.

Option B is incorrect:

Must-affinity rules can help, but they should be configured after migrating the VM back to the

primary site.

Option D is incorrect:

Running NCC health checks will only diagnose the issue, not resolve it.

Nutanix Bible → Metro Availability and Data Locality

Nutanix Best Practices → VM Affinity Rules for Metro Availability

Nutanix KB → Troubleshooting Remote Data Access in Metro Availability

Guest customization options allow administrators to automate OS configuration during VM

deployment from a template.

Option A (Sysprep, Cloud-init, Custom Script, Guided Script) is correct:

Sysprep (for Windows) and Cloud-init (for Linux) enable custom OS configurations.

Custom Scripts can be used for advanced automation.

Options B and C are incorrect:

Bash, Powershell, Python, and YAML can be used in automation, but they are not guest

customization options in VM templates.

Option D is incorrect:

Guest customization is fully supported in Nutanix templates.

Nutanix VM Deployment Guide → Using Cloud-Init and Sysprep for Guest Customization

Nutanix KB → Automating VM Deployments with Guest Customization

When using Metric or Entity Charts in Prism Central for performance monitoring, the most granular

preset time interval that can be selected is 1 hour.

From the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) course materials:

“Prism Central provides performance data visualization with customizable time intervals. The

smallest preset interval for metric and entity charts is 1 hour, providing highly detailed performance

information over short periods.”

This allows administrators to monitor performance fluctuations at a fine-grained level, aligning with

best practices for troubleshooting and optimization.

Offset-based IP mapping in Nutanix Recovery Plans allows automatic subnet changes during DR

failover.

Option D (Utilize Recovery Plan Offset-based IP mapping) is correct:

This method automatically adjusts the IP range while keeping the same last octet.

It eliminates the need for manual intervention after failover.

Option A (Custom script) is incorrect:

Scripting is an option, but Recovery Plan IP mapping is simpler and native to Nutanix.

Option B (Use IPAM) is incorrect:

IP Address Management (IPAM) is useful, but offset-based mapping provides more control.

Option C (Manually update IPs) is incorrect:

This would be time-consuming and error-prone.

Nutanix Disaster Recovery Guide → Using Offset-Based IP Mapping

Nutanix KB → Best Practices for Managing IP Addresses in DR

In a dark site deployment, LCM does not automatically fetch updates from the internet. The

administrator must manually upload compatibility bundles.

Option B (The latest compatibility bundle has not been uploaded) is correct:

The compatibility bundle contains firmware mappings, allowing LCM to detect the correct BIOS

version.

Option A is incorrect:

AOS does not need to be upgraded first for a BIOS update.

Option C is incorrect:

The BMC firmware does not always need updating before BIOS updates.

Option D is incorrect:

In a dark site deployment, LCM does not rely on an internet connection, so webserver access is not

required.

Nutanix LCM Guide → Using Compatibility Bundles in Dark Sites

Nutanix KB → Troubleshooting Firmware Updates in Dark Site Deployments

Syslog severity levels follow a standard numerical system, where lower numbers indicate higher

severity.

Option B (Severity Level 2) is correct:

Level 2 = CRITICAL → Used for serious conditions requiring immediate attention.

Audit logs often generate Critical logs related to security, access violations, or major failures.

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Options A (0), C (5), and D (7) are incorrect:

0 = Emergency (Too severe, only used for full system failures).

5 = Notice (Not critical, used for general system events).

7 = Debug (Not relevant for critical logs).

Nutanix Security Guide → Syslog Integration and Severity Levels

Nutanix KB → Configuring Syslog for Prism Central Audit Logs

For workloads requiring new IP addresses and DNS server settings during DR recovery, using custom

scripting within the Recovery Plan is the recommended and supported method.

From the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA) course materials:

“Recovery Plans support scripting within the Recovery Sequence to enable administrators to perform

post-recovery customization tasks, such as updating IP addresses, configuring DNS, or applying

application-specific settings.”

“This scripting capability provides a flexible, automated approach to ensure that VMs are correctly

reconfigured to operate within the DR environment’s network and DNS settings.”

This avoids the need for manual reconfiguration post-recovery or adjusting settings in production

prior to failover.

Thank you for your visit.

Understanding the Issue

The administrator is investigating VM performance complaints and is analyzing CPU Ready Time

data.

CPU Ready Time is a crucial metric in Nutanix and virtualization environments (AHV, ESXi, or Hyper-

V).

It measures the amount of time a VM is waiting for CPU scheduling due to resource contention.

High CPU Ready Time indicates that VMs are ready to run but are waiting because the host lacks

available CPU resources.

Analysis of the Exhibit

The graph shows CPU Ready Time spikes for multiple VMs.

Some VMs have CPU Ready Time exceeding 18% to 21.5%, which is very high.

A healthy CPU Ready Time should be below 5%.

Values above 10% indicate CPU contention, and anything above 20% is critical and requires

immediate troubleshooting.

Evaluating the Answer Choices

❌ (A) Check the number of vCPUs assigned to each CVM. (Incorrect)

CVMs (Controller VMs) have fixed CPU allocation, and modifying their vCPU count is not

recommended unless advised by Nutanix Support.

The issue is related to VM CPU contention, not CVM configuration.

✅ (B) Review host CPU utilization. (Correct Answer)

High CPU Ready Time suggests CPU overcommitment or host saturation.

The administrator should check host CPU usage in Prism Central to determine if the cluster is

overloaded.

If host CPU usage is consistently above 85–90%, VMs are competing for CPU resources, leading to

high CPU Ready Time.

❌ (C) Assess cluster SSD capacity. (Incorrect)

SSD capacity impacts storage performance (latency, read/write speeds) but does not affect CPU

Ready Time.

High CPU Ready Time is a CPU scheduling issue, not a storage bottleneck.

❌ (D) Enable VM memory oversubscription. (Incorrect)

Memory oversubscription does not impact CPU scheduling.

Enabling memory oversubscription affects RAM allocation, but CPU Ready Time is strictly related to

CPU contention.

Next Steps to Diagnose & Resolve the Issue

Review Host CPU Utilization:

Navigate to Prism Central → Analysis → CPU Usage per Host.

Identify hosts experiencing high CPU load.

Check VM vCPU Allocation:

Ensure that VMs do not have excessive vCPUs assigned, which can lead to scheduling inefficiencies.

Overprovisioning vCPUs can cause unnecessary contention.

Balance Workload Across Hosts:

Use Nutanix AHV DRS (Dynamic Scheduling) or VMware DRS to redistribute VMs across hosts.

Check if certain hosts are overloaded while others have spare CPU capacity.

Consider Scaling Out the Cluster:

If CPU usage is consistently high, adding more nodes may be required to reduce CPU contention.

Multicloud Infrastructure

& Best Practices

CPU Ready Time Best Practices:

Keep CPU Ready Time below 5%.

Avoid overcommitting vCPUs on heavily loaded hosts.

Monitor Prism Central Runway Metrics to predict future CPU resource needs.

Nutanix AHV CPU Scheduling Optimization:

Ensure proper VM sizing (avoid excessive vCPU allocation).

Balance workloads using Nutanix AHV DRS.

References:

Nutanix Prism Central: Performance Analysis and CPU Metrics

Nutanix Bible: VM Performance and Resource Management

Nutanix KB: Troubleshooting High CPU Ready Time in AHV

To ensure VM high availability (HA) in the event of a node failure, the administrator must enable HA

Reservation (Option B) in Prism Element.

High Availability (HA) in Nutanix ensures that VMs restart on another available node if the host they

are running on fails.

Option A (Redundancy Factor 3) affects storage redundancy, not VM failover.

Option C (Protection Domains) is related to disaster recovery (DR), not local HA failover.

Option D (RF1 Storage Container) would reduce fault tolerance and is not recommended for

production environments.

Nutanix Prism Element Guide → Configuring HA Reservation

Nutanix Bible → High Availability (HA) and Failover

Nutanix Support KB → VM Recovery with HA Enabled

For optimal Disaster Recovery performance, new nodes must match or exceed the storage

performance of existing nodes.

Option A (New node must have at least 2 SSDs) is correct:

Since the G7 nodes have two SSDs, replacing G5 nodes with at least 2 SSDs ensures consistent SSD

cache and performance.

Option B is incorrect:

G7 or G8 nodes may help, but storage performance is more critical for DR.

Option C is incorrect:

CPU core count does not impact DR storage performance as much as SSD capacity.

Option D is incorrect:

Hybrid nodes are already in use, but SSDs must match for performance balance.

Nutanix Hardware Guide → Choosing Nodes for Hybrid and DR Clusters

Nutanix KB → Balancing Storage Across Different Hardware Generations

Active-Active bonding allows multiple network interfaces to be used simultaneously, improving

bandwidth and redundancy.

Option B (Active-Active) is correct:

This mode enables load balancing across all available adapters, providing higher throughput and fault

tolerance.

Option A (No Uplink Bond) is incorrect:

Without a bond, VMs cannot benefit from multiple adapters.

Option C (Active-Active with MAC pinning) is incorrect:

MAC pinning binds traffic to a single NIC, limiting bandwidth distribution.

Option D (Active-Backup) is incorrect:

This mode only provides failover, not increased bandwidth.

Nutanix AHV Networking Guide → Bonding Modes and Load Balancing

Nutanix KB → Optimizing Network Throughput in AHV

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Nutanix-Security-Guide-v6_10:mulconfigure-data-in-transit-encryption-pc-t.html

"Ensure that port 2009 is open between the Prism Central instances for the KMS cluster to

communicate."

This is explicitly stated in the "Firewall rules for Data-in-Transit Encryption" section for Prism Central.

Technical Context:

Port 2009 is used by ZooKeeper (the coordination service for the KMS cluster) in Scale-Out Prism

Central deployments.

DiTE in Prism Central relies on a dedicated KMS cluster that synchronizes encryption keys across PC

instances using this port.

Firewall blocks on port 2009 break KMS quorum, preventing key exchange and causing DiTE to fail.

In Nutanix Prism Central, user-generated reports in Intelligent Operations are stored for a limited

time and then deleted automatically.

Option C (Reports are automatically deleted after 24 hours) is correct:

Reports do not persist indefinitely unless they are scheduled reports.

One-time reports expire after 24 hours.

Option A (Cluster Viewer deleted the report) is incorrect:

Cluster Viewer does not have permissions to delete reports.

Option B (Report was archived) is incorrect:

Nutanix does not automatically archive reports.

Option D (Report stored in Prism Element) is incorrect:

Reports are generated and stored only in Prism Central, not Prism Element.

Nutanix Prism Central Guide → Intelligent Operations & Report Retention Policies

Nutanix KB → Why Reports in Prism Central Are Not Persisting

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