Nutanix NCS-Core Practice Test - Questions Answers, Page 10

When looking for documents that identify specific ports such as the Shared IPMI port on nodes, the best location within the Nutanix Support Portal is the Hardware Replacement Documentation. This section specifically deals with physical components and their configurations, making it the most appropriate resource for identifying physical port locations and specifications related to specific Nutanix hardware models.

Reference: Nutanix Support Portal, Nutanix Bible, and NCS-Core 6.8 materials specifically mentioning hardware documentation.

Ref: https://support-portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details/?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v55:sto-metro-availability-witness-c.html

Ref: https://support-portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/details?targetId=Web-Console-Guide-Prism-v5_10:wc-protection-domain-wc-c.html

Ref: https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/redundancy-factor-vs-replication-factor-37486

Erasure coding is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces, and stored across a set of different locations or storage media. The goal of erasure coding is to enable data that becomes corrupted at some point in the disk storage process to be reconstructed by using information about the data that's stored elsewhere in the array1.

In the context of Nutanix, erasure coding increases the usable capacity on a cluster. Instead of replicating data, erasure coding uses parity information to rebuild data in the event of a disk failure1. The capacity savings of erasure coding is in addition to deduplication and compression savings1.

Given the characteristics of the VM in the question (large/sequential writes, data kept for years, data accessed only at the end of the year), Post-Process Compression would be the most suitable feature to utilize to save space. This is because Post-Process Compression, as the name suggests, compresses data after it has been written to the storage, which is suitable for data that is not accessed frequently2.

Erasure Coding | Nutanix Community

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Introducing AOS 6.6: Enhanced data services and simplified ... - Nutanix

In Nutanix, a cluster with RF2 (Redundancy Factor 2) can tolerate the failure of a single node or drive1. However, to ensure that the cluster can survive a complete rack failure without negatively affecting workload performance, we need to consider rack awareness. When rack fault tolerance is enabled, the cluster has rack awareness and the guest VMs can continue to run with failure of one rack (RF2) or two racks (RF3).The redundant copies of guest VM data and metadata exist on other racks when one rack fails2.

Given the current cluster configuration (30 nodes distributed 10 nodes per rack across three 42U racks), adding 3 additional nodes per rack (9 nodes total) would increase the redundancy of the cluster and improve its ability to withstand a complete rack failure. This is because the additional nodes would provide more storage capacity and compute resources, allowing the cluster to continue running workloads even if one rack fails.

Understanding Fault Domains and Rack Awareness | Nutanix Community

RF2 -> RF3 | Requirements | Nutanix Community

The administrator's goal is to maximize storage potential in a cluster already configured with post-process compression and capacity deduplication. Erasure Coding (EC-X) is an effective method to further increase space savings by reducing the amount of redundancy data required for fault tolerance. It splits data into multiple chunks, which are distributed across the cluster, and parity is calculated and stored. This method is more space-efficient compared to traditional RAID or mirroring techniques, especially in environments where large data volumes need efficient storage.

Nutanix Bible: Storage Efficiency

Nutanix University: Storage Configuration and Optimization