NCP-EUC Exam Dumps - Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) Questions and Answers

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.

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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.

According to the Nutanix Network Configuration and RDMA guidelines, uniformity of the physical network layer is a strict requirement for enabling RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE).

Specifically, Nutanix does not support mixing network cards with different speeds within the same cluster when RDMA is involved. If the cluster contains a mix of nodes where some are connected at 10 Gbps and others at 25 Gbps (or higher), the Prism interface will disable (grey out) the RDMA configuration options to prevent an unsupported or unstable fabric configuration. To resolve this and proceed with enabling RDMA network segmentation, the administrator must ensure that all RDMA-capable NICs across all nodes are operating at the same supported speed (typically 25 Gbps or higher).

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

According to Nutanix AHV Administration Guide regarding GPU Pass-Through:

Hardware Binding: GPU Pass-Through (DirectPath I/O) binds a virtual machine to a specific physical PCIe device on the host. Unlike vGPU (which abstracts the hardware), passthrough creates a 1:1 dependency.

HA Behavior: Nutanix AHV supports High Availability (HA) for GPU-enabled VMs in the sense that if a host fails, the system attempts to restart the VM on another host (Cold Migration). Option C ("Not HA-capable") is incorrect because the system attempts the restart; it does not simply abandon the VM by design.

Failure Cause: The restart fails (the "behavior" described) because the destination host must have the exact same GPU hardware resource available (free and matching the profile/addressing). If the other nodes in the cluster do not have a free GPU of the same type, or if they are already fully utilized, the VM cannot power on, resulting in the "Insufficient GPU resources" error.

To enable Secure Boot and vTPM on a Nutanix AHV cluster, specific VM configuration requirements must be met. According to the Nutanix AHV Administration and Security guides, Secure Boot prevents malicious code from loading during the boot process by ensuring that only signed drivers and OS loaders are used.

When configuring a VM for Secure Boot, the machine type must be set to q35. The standard legacy machine type (i440fx) does not support the necessary features for Secure Boot and vTPM operations in this context. Documentation for creating or updating a VM with these features via the Acropolis CLI (aCLI) explicitly includes the parameter machine_type=q35 in the command string (e.g., vm.create vm-name machine_type=q35 uefi_boot=true secure_boot=true virtual_tpm=true). Furthermore, if an administrator attempts to update an existing VM to enable Secure Boot without this machine type, the operation will fail or require the conversion, as Secure Boot and vTPM are supported specifically on the Q35 virtual hardware platform combined with UEFI boot mode.

Legacy BIOS (Option C) is explicitly unsupported for Secure Boot, as UEFI is a strict prerequisite. Hardware TPM pass-through (Option D) is not used; instead, AHV utilizes a software-based vTPM that keeps the crypto keys independent of the underlying hardware to allow for VM mobility.

Relevance of the video: The video provides a step-by-step visual guide on enabling Credential Guard and Secure Boot for Windows VMs on Nutanix AHV, which directly illustrates the configuration steps and requirements discussed in the question, including the necessary VM settings.

Enabling Credential Guard for AHV Windows VMs

According to standard VDI image preparation best practices (including those for testing with tools like LoginVSI), the foundational step before any benchmarking can occur is to Install and patch the Operating System.

A benchmark is invalid if it is run on an incomplete or vulnerable OS. The standard workflow is:

Install OS and standard runtimes.

Patch fully (to represent a realistic production state).

Optimize (OSOT).

Option A represents the critical mandatory "Action" required to build the base image for the test.

persistent virtual desktops are virtual desktops that retain their state and configuration across sessions.

This means that users can customize their virtual desktops with their own applications, settings, and data, and have them available every time they log on.

Persistent virtual desktops are suitable for users who need a consistent and personalized experience, such as developers.

According to Nutanix best practices2, one of the recommended migration paths for persistent virtual desktops is to convert the physical computers to virtual desktops.

This can be done by using a tool such as VMware Converter or Microsoft Disk2vhd to create a virtual disk image of the physical computer’s hard drive.

Then, this image can be imported into Nutanix Cloud Platform and used as a base image for creating persistent virtual desktops.

This migration path can preserve the existing applications, settings, and data of the physical computers and minimize the disruption for the users.

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

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Nutanix and Citrix DaaS documents:

According to Citrix Cloud and Nutanix DR best practices:

High Availability Requirement: Citrix strongly recommends and practically enforces a requirement of at least two (2) Cloud Connectors per Resource Location (RL).

Reasoning: Cloud Connectors are "evergreen" components that update automatically from the cloud. During an update, a connector may reboot. If only one connector exists (Option A), the Resource Location would go offline, severing connectivity for the DR site.

Production vs. DR: A Disaster Recovery (DR) site is treated as a production Resource Location because it must be ready to accept user connections instantly during a failover. Therefore, the minimum N+1 redundancy rule applies, requiring 2 connectors.

For Virtual Machine operations involving vGPUs (NVIDIA GRID) on Nutanix AHV, it is a strict requirement that all GPU nodes must run the same version of the host driver.

To support VM mobility, live migration, and High Availability (HA) within the cluster, the source and destination hosts must have compatible GPU profiles and identical driver versions. If drivers are mismatched between nodes, the GPU state cannot be successfully transferred or re-initialized, preventing migration and potentially causing VM power-on failures. While a cluster can contain a subset of nodes with GPUs (heterogeneous cluster), the nodes that do have GPUs must be uniform in their driver configuration.