Nutanix NCP-CI-AWS Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 3

Amazon CloudWatch is the service that enables the monitoring of key metrics on various AWS services, including EC2, EBS, and VPC, for NC2 cluster deployments.

Amazon CloudWatch:

Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications. It collects and tracks metrics, collects and monitors log files, and sets alarms.

Specifically, for NC2 deployments, CloudWatch can be used to monitor key metrics such as CPU utilization, disk I/O, network I/O for EC2 instances, EBS volume performance, and VPC network traffic.

Features:

Metrics Monitoring: Collects and visualizes operational data in the form of metrics, including utilization, performance, and health.

Logs Monitoring: Collects log data, monitors it in real-time, and triggers alarms based on predefined thresholds.

Alarms: Notifies when operational performance thresholds are breached.

Integration with NC2:

By setting up CloudWatch, administrators can ensure they have visibility into the performance and health of their Nutanix clusters on AWS, aiding in proactive management and troubleshooting.

Amazon CloudWatch Documentation

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

AWS Monitoring Best Practices

The role of 'Customer Administrator' in Nutanix Cloud Integration with AWS (NC2) is designed to meet the requirements of creating and managing multiple organizations and clusters, as well as managing user access for the entire company.

Roles and Permissions:

Customer Administrator: This role has the broadest set of permissions, allowing the user to create and manage organizations, clusters, and user access across the entire company. It encompasses administrative control over multiple aspects of the NC2 environment.

Capabilities:

Organization Management: Ability to create and manage multiple organizations.

Cluster Management: Full control over creating, configuring, and managing clusters.

User Access Management: Manage user roles and permissions, ensuring that the right individuals have access to the necessary resources.

Why Not Other Roles:

Organization Administrator: Limited to managing organizations but not clusters and user access at the company level.

Customer Security Administrator: Focuses on security aspects, lacking broader administrative capabilities.

Cluster Administrator: Limited to managing clusters without the ability to manage organizations and user access comprehensively.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

Nutanix Role-Based Access Control Documentation

When creating user VM subnets for multiple NC2 clusters in AWS, the best approach is to create guest-VM subnets for each cluster. This ensures that each cluster has its own dedicated subnets, which simplifies network management and avoids potential IP conflicts.

Advantages of Dedicated Subnets:

Isolation: Each cluster operates in its own subnet, providing better isolation and security.

Management: Easier to manage and troubleshoot network issues when each cluster has its own subnets.

Scalability: More scalable as each subnet can be managed and expanded independently.

Steps to Create Guest-VM Subnets:

Identify the IP range for each subnet.

In the AWS VPC console, create a new subnet for each cluster using the identified IP ranges.

Associate the new subnets with the respective clusters during or after the cluster deployment process.

Why Not Shared Subnets:

Shared subnets could lead to IP conflicts and make network management more complex, especially as the number of clusters grows.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

AWS VPC Subnet Creation Documentation

To protect workloads on an NC2 cluster on AWS, deploying strategies that ensure high availability and disaster recovery are essential. The two valid options are:

Create a Second NC2 Cluster in a Different Availability Zone:

High Availability: Deploying a second NC2 cluster in a different availability zone ensures that workloads can be quickly recovered in case of an availability zone failure.

Disaster Recovery: This setup enables asynchronous replication between clusters, providing a robust disaster recovery solution.

Use an Existing On-Prem Nutanix Cluster as a Disaster Recovery Target:

Hybrid DR: Leveraging an existing on-premises Nutanix cluster for disaster recovery provides a cost-effective and efficient DR solution.

Replication: Set up replication policies to ensure data is consistently copied from the NC2 cluster on AWS to the on-premises cluster.

Why Not Other Options:

One-node cluster in another availability zone: Not a valid DR solution as a single-node cluster cannot provide the required resilience and high availability.

Deploy a cluster across two availability zones: While this can enhance availability, it is not a typical approach for Nutanix clusters which are designed to operate within a single availability zone for simplicity and performance reasons.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

Nutanix Disaster Recovery Best Practices

AWS Availability Zones and Disaster Recovery Documentation

The exhibit shows two cloud accounts, one for Azure and one for AWS, with their statuses indicated. The AWS cloud account status is marked as 'U' (which likely stands for 'Unavailable' or 'Unreachable'). This indicates that the AWS cloud account configuration is not properly connected or accessible.

Status Check:

The AWS cloud account is marked with an 'U' status, meaning it is not active or accessible.

This status prevents the creation of an NC2 cluster because the necessary cloud resources cannot be allocated or managed without a proper connection.

Action:

The best course of action is to create a new cloud account in the organization. This involves setting up the cloud account details correctly and ensuring it is properly configured to communicate with Nutanix and AWS.

Steps to Create a New Cloud Account:

Log in to the Nutanix console.

Navigate to the 'Organizations' section.

Select 'Add Cloud Account' and provide the required AWS credentials and permissions.

Ensure the new cloud account is active and correctly configured.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

Nutanix Best Practices for Cloud Account Management

To ensure that NC2 VMs can access AWS resources without traversing the internet, the administrator can use AWS VPC Peering and Interface Endpoints. Both methods ensure that traffic stays within the AWS network, maintaining security and efficiency.

Interface Endpoint:

Interface Endpoints allow you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services. They use AWS PrivateLink to route traffic directly to services within the AWS network, bypassing the public internet.

Steps:

Create an interface endpoint for the required service in the AWS VPC console.

Ensure the security groups and route tables are configured to allow traffic to the interface endpoint.

VPC Peering:

VPC Peering allows the routing of traffic between VPCs using private IP addresses, without the need for internet gateways, NAT devices, or VPN connections.

Steps:

Create a VPC peering connection between the VPCs.

Update the route tables to direct traffic between the peered VPCs.

Ensure security group rules allow the necessary traffic between VPCs.

AWS VPC Peering Documentation

AWS Interface Endpoint Documentation

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

To add an AWS account to the NC2 console, an AWS IAM user needs to be configured with the appropriate permissions to manage the EC2 resources. The required permission for the IAM user includes full access to manage EC2 instances, volumes, and related resources.

AmazonEC2FullAccess:

This permission grants full access to all EC2 resources, including the ability to create, modify, and delete instances, volumes, security groups, and more.

Essential for NC2 operations to manage the lifecycle of EC2 instances and associated components within the AWS environment.

Why Not Other Permissions:

IAMFullAccess: Grants full access to IAM resources but not specifically needed for EC2 operations.

IAMReadOnlyAccess: Only provides read access to IAM resources, insufficient for managing EC2 instances.

AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess: Provides read-only access to EC2 resources, insufficient for creating or modifying instances and other resources.

AWS IAM Policies Documentation

Nutanix Cloud Clusters on AWS Administration Guide

Nutanix Best Practices for IAM User Permissions

The error message in the image indicates that the cluster creation failed due to reaching the maximum retries for provisioning cluster nodes. Here are two possible scenarios that could lead to this issue:

Insufficient Permissions (Answer B):

If the AWS user or role used to create the cluster does not have sufficient permissions, it can result in failures during the provisioning process. Proper IAM policies must be attached to ensure that the necessary actions can be performed, such as launching instances, creating VPCs, or managing networking components.

AWS Quota Exceeded/Instance Limit Exceeded (Answer D):

AWS imposes quotas and limits on the number of instances and other resources that can be created within an account. If these quotas are exceeded, new instances cannot be provisioned, causing the cluster creation to fail. This can be resolved by requesting a quota increase from AWS.

Nutanix Knowledge Base Article 9774

AWS Service Quotas

Nutanix NC2 on AWS Documentation

For the NC2 cluster deployed in the North Virginia region (us-east-id), consuming IPs from the 10.78.2.0/24 range, the subnets configured within the same CIDR range of 10.78.0.0/16 will be recognized.

The subnet DR01 (10.78.2.0/24) is directly within the range of the deployed cluster.

The subnet L2stretch (10.19.101.0/24) is also configured in the NC2 AWS VPC, although not in the immediate range of the cluster, it may show up due to broader network configurations for stretched L2 operations.

Subnets VDI (10.78.130.0/22) and DR02 (10.79.120.0/24), although part of the same VPC, are not directly within the immediate CIDR range or may not be recognized in this specific configuration scenario.

Reference: Refer to the Nutanix documentation on NC2 AWS VPC subnet configurations and Prism Element settings for detailed guidelines on network visibility and configuration.