NCA Practice Questions
Prepare for NCA with more than an answer.
- Exam fee
- $99 USD
- Level
- Associate
- Valid for
- 2 years
Domains covered on the exam 4
- Describe Lifecycle Management15%
- Describe Nutanix Basic Administration25%
- Maintain the Environmental Health of a Nutanix cluster environment35%
- Describe Cluster Configuration Options25%
- 1
A Nutanix cluster is comprised of nodes that are physically distributed across three separate server racks in a data center. To ensure maximum data availability in the event of a complete rack failure, which TWO features must be configured? (Select TWO)
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Correct answer: A, B
- 2
Which Nutanix component is responsible for storing persistent configuration data and serving as the central point for cluster-wide tasks and metadata management?
flowchart TD A[Prism] --> B{Zookeeper} C[Stargate] --> B D[Curator] --> B B --> E((Cassandra DB)) E --> BShow answer details
Correct answer: C
Zookeeper is a critical service running on the CVMs that manages cluster configuration and coordination. It maintains the cluster state and ensures consistency across all nodes. While Medusa (which uses Cassandra) stores the bulk of the metadata, Zookeeper is the coordinator that manages access and modifications to this critical information, making it the central point for configuration management.
- 3
True or False: The Cluster Virtual IP (VIP) address is required for a Nutanix cluster to be considered functional.
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Correct answer: A
True. The Cluster Virtual IP (VIP) is a mandatory component. It provides a single, highly-available endpoint for accessing Prism Element and for external services to communicate with the cluster. If a node hosting the VIP fails, the IP address automatically fails over to another CVM, ensuring continuous management access. A cluster without a configured VIP is not considered fully functional or resilient.
- 4
While monitoring an LCM upgrade, an administrator notices the process has stopped on a particular node and is not proceeding. The task details show a pre-check failure. What is the most likely cause for this halt?
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Correct answer: A
LCM prioritizes cluster stability above all else. Before performing an upgrade on any node, it runs a series of pre-checks, including critical NCC health checks. If any of these checks fail (e.g., indicating a hardware issue, network problem, or service instability), LCM will halt the upgrade process to prevent potential data loss or cluster outage. The administrator must resolve the reported NCC failure before the upgrade can be resumed.
- 5
A university maintains a Nutanix cluster for student lab environments. To manage resources effectively, they need to track which department is using the most storage and compute. Which Prism Central feature can be used to categorize VMs by department and report on their resource consumption?
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Correct answer: C
Categories in Prism Central are a powerful metadata tagging feature. An administrator can create a category called 'Department' with values like 'Engineering', 'Science', and 'Arts'. By applying these category tags to VMs, they can then use Prism Central's reporting and analysis tools to group, filter, and view resource consumption (CPU, memory, storage) based on these user-defined tags.
- 6
A financial services company is deploying a new 5-node Nutanix cluster for a critical OLTP database application. The compliance department mandates that the system must tolerate the simultaneous failure of any two nodes without data loss or unavailability. Which configuration must be applied to the storage container housing the database files?
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Correct answer: B
Replication Factor 3 (RF3) is required to tolerate the failure of two nodes simultaneously. RF3 maintains three copies of the data across different nodes in the cluster. This configuration requires a minimum of 5 nodes. Replication Factor 2 can only tolerate a single node failure. Erasure Coding provides space efficiency but its failure tolerance depends on the strip size and is not the direct setting for this requirement.
- 7
A systems administrator is reviewing the Prism Element dashboard and observes a critical alert indicating that a CVM is down. The cluster is configured with RF2. What is the immediate impact on the VMs that were running on the affected host?
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Correct answer: C
When a Controller VM (CVM) fails, the Nutanix cluster's High Availability mechanism ensures that VMs on the affected host remain running. The hypervisor redirects I/O from the local VMs to other healthy CVMs in the cluster over the 10GbE network. This maintains VM uptime, although there might be a temporary increase in I/O latency until the CVM recovers or the VMs are migrated.
- 8
During a routine health check, an administrator finds that the Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) has reported a PASS WITH WARNINGS status. What is the recommended next step?
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Correct answer: B
A 'PASS WITH WARNINGS' status indicates that the cluster is functional but there are non-critical issues that should be addressed to prevent future problems. The first step is to analyze the specific warning messages in the NCC report to understand their nature and potential impact before taking further action. Opening a P1 case is premature, and ignoring the warnings is not a best practice.
- 9
An IT team is preparing to perform a one-click AOS upgrade using the Life Cycle Manager (LCM). Which TWO actions are automatically performed by LCM as part of the pre-upgrade checks? (Select TWO)
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Correct answer: A, B
- 10
A new administrator is tasked with creating a virtual machine for a test/dev environment. The VM requires 4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, and a 100 GB disk. The administrator navigates to the VM creation wizard in Prism Element. Where would the administrator specify the storage container for the VM's disk?
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Correct answer: C
In the Prism Element VM creation wizard, storage is managed under the 'Disks' section. The administrator must click 'Add New Disk' or edit the default CD-ROM device. In the disk configuration dialog, they can specify the 'Storage Container', the disk size, and other disk-related properties. Compute and general configuration sections do not contain storage placement options.
