Nutanix NCP-EUC Nutanix Certified Professional - End User Computing (NCP-EUC) 6.10 Exam Exam Practice Test

In the context of distributing connections across multiple broker VMs (such as Citrix Delivery Controllers or Horizon Connection Servers) without introducing complex third-party infrastructure dependencies like strict SDN overlays (Option A), Round-robin DNS is the standard supported method for connection distribution mentioned in basic Nutanix EUC architecture guides.

While enterprise production environments often use dedicated External Load Balancers (like Citrix ADC), Option A implies the mandatory use of Flow Virtual Networking (an overlay SDN solution) to achieve this, which is not a standard requirement for simple broker load balancing. Therefore, among the available choices, creating multiple DNS A-records for the broker FQDN (Round-robin DNS) is the valid mechanism to distribute incoming user traffic across the available broker nodes.

A high CPU Ready time means that the vCPU is waiting too long for the pCPU, which can result in poor performance and slow responsiveness of the virtual machine (VM).

According to Nutanix best practices2, one of the factors that can affect CPU Ready time is the host power policy. The host power policy determines how aggressively the host will try to save power by reducing the frequency or voltage of the pCPUs.

The recommended host power policy for Nutanix clusters is High Performance, which disables any power saving features and ensures that the pCPUs run at their maximum frequency and voltage.

This answer seems to explain why desktops on one host are running slower and have higher CPU Ready times than on other hosts, as they may be suffering from reduced pCPU performance due to a lower host power policy.

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

According to Nutanix VDI Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning best practices:

Symptom Analysis: "Sluggish mouse and keyboard response" is a classic symptom of high CPU contention or high Latency on the host or VM. Since the environment was previously stable ("No additional virtual desktops added") and the change was "dramatic," it points to a new process consuming resources unexpectedly.

The "Agent" Factor: In non-persistent VDI environments, a common cause for sudden performance degradation affecting an "entire department" is an Antivirus or Security Agent running a scheduled scan or a signature update simultaneously across all clones. This creates a "storm" of IOPS and CPU usage (often called an AV storm), starving the user sessions of the resources needed for basic input processing (mouse/keyboard).

Why not others?

Unoptimized master image (B): This would cause poor performance from day one, not a "dramatic change" after 60 days of stability.

Legacy drivers (C): Drivers do not degrade suddenly; they would cause issues from the time of installation.

Over-provisioning (D): This usually results in gradual degradation as user concurrency increases, not a sudden cliff-edge drop in performance if user counts haven't changed.

VMware Horizon is a solution that delivers Windows and Linux virtual desktops and published applications to end users from centralized servers.

One of the best practices for delivering Microsoft Office 365 in VMware Horizon is to disable Cached Exchange Mode for Outlook3. This can improve performance and reduce storage requirements.

There are different profile management toolsets that can be used with Office 365 and VMware Horizon. One of them is Horizon Persona Management4, which is a feature that synchronizes user profiles with a remote repository and provides a personalized desktop experience.

Another option is FSLogix Profile Management5, which is a Microsoft solution that enhances Office 365 performance in non-persistent VDI environments by redirecting user profiles to virtual disks.

https://techzone.vmware.com/resource/best-practices-delivering-microsoft-office-365-vmware-horizon

Nutanix Prism Central includes Behavioral Learning and Efficiency reporting tools designed to identify inefficient resource usage.7

To verify if VMs are "using less than their configured memory" (wasted resources), the administrator should view the Over-provisioned VMs list within the Efficiency widget. Nutanix defines an "Over-provisioned VM" as one that is sized with more resources (CPU/Memory) than it actually consumes based on historical performance data.8 This list explicitly identifies these VMs, allowing the administrator to right-size them and reclaim cluster resources, whereas Task Manager (Option A) is manual/individual, and Capacity Runway (Option D) focuses on global cluster storage/resource exhaustion time rather than individual VM efficiency.

Shadow Clones are a feature of the AOS storage that enables distributed caching of virtual disks (vDisks) that are read by multiple VMs on different nodes. This can improve performance and reduce network traffic in scenarios such as VDI deployments.

Therefore, if Shadow Clones were disabled, it could cause delays in the deployments of VD’ desktops, as they would have to read the vDisk from a remote node instead of a local cache.

In the "Omnissa Horizon on Nutanix Best Practices" (formerly VMware Horizon), the recommended provisioning method for non-persistent desktops (specifically for task workers who do not need to retain user-installed apps) is Instant Clones.6

Instant Clones (vmFork technology) allow for the rapid provisioning of desktop VMs that share a base image and memory footprint, offering high storage efficiency and fast deployment times. Nutanix AHV and AOS are fully optimized to support Instant Clones (often utilizing Shadow Clones for caching the replica disk). Linked Clones (Option D) are considered a legacy technology and are deprecated in modern versions of Horizon. Full Clones (Option C) are typically reserved for persistent, power-user use cases where storage efficiency is less of a priority than persistence.

To ensure high availability for distributed applications such as load-balanced web servers, Nutanix AHV allows administrators to configure Anti-Affinity rules.

An Anti-Affinity rule specifies that a group of virtual machines should never run on the same AHV host simultaneously. By applying an Anti-Affinity rule to the three web server VMs, the Acropolis Scheduler ensures they are distributed across different physical nodes in the cluster.

In the scenario described, the web servers likely resided on the same host (or the failing host held the only active instance). If Anti-Affinity rules had been configured, the other web server VMs would have been running on healthy hosts, ensuring continued user access to the VDI environment despite the single node failure.

The optimal storage configuration aligns the container settings with the specific I/O patterns of the workload types:

Non-Persistent Desktops: These are typically linked clones (MCS/Instant Clones) with high write churn and little data commonality in the delta disks. Compression Only is best. Deduplication adds overhead with no benefit.

Persistent Full Clones: These are full copies of the OS. Because there are hundreds of copies of the same OS files, Deduplication (Capacity or Performance tier) is highly effective at saving space. Compression is always recommended.

Therefore, creating two separate containers—one configured with Compression Only (for the non-persistent pools) and one with Compression and Deduplication (for the persistent full clone pools)—provides the best balance of performance and capacity efficiency (Option D).

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

According to Nutanix Validated Designs (NVD) for Citrix DaaS:

Control Plane: The requirement to "reduce brokering infrastructure footprint" dictates the use of Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Cloud), which offloads the Delivery Controllers and SQL databases to the Citrix cloud service, leaving only the lightweight Cloud Connectors on-premises.

Placement: In a large multisite architecture using the standard "Block and Pod" design, Nutanix recommends separating Management/Infrastructure functions from Workload functions.

Best Practice: Cloud Connectors are critical infrastructure components. They should be deployed on the AHV Infrastructure Clusters (Management Clusters) in each resource location, rather than the Workload clusters, to ensure they are protected from resource contention caused by user desktops and to maintain a clean separation of duties.

The error message "Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel" when attempting to connect Citrix Studio to a Nutanix AHV cluster indicates a protocol mismatch between the Citrix Delivery Controller and the Nutanix Prism interface.

Nutanix AOS enforces strict TLS 1.2 security standards. To communicate effectively with the Nutanix cluster, the Citrix Delivery Controllers must have the correct version of the Nutanix AHV Plugin for Citrix installed. This plugin manages the hosting connection and ensures that the communication utilizes the required TLS 1.2 protocols and cipher suites. If the plugin is missing, outdated, or corrupted, the secure channel cannot be established, resulting in this specific error. Installing or upgrading to the latest supported plugin resolves the communication failure.

Nutanix supports Data-in-Transit Encryption to secure traffic flowing between nodes (CVM to CVM) and between the CVM and hypervisor. This feature uses TLS to encrypt replication and storage data traffic.

However, the Security Guide notes that enabling encryption introduces computational overhead. The encryption and decryption of storage traffic are handled by the Controller VM (CVM) CPUs. Therefore, a key design consideration is that this configuration results in increased CVM CPU utilization. Consequently, due to the processing time required for encryption operations, there may be a slight increase in I/O latency. Administrators must ensure the cluster has sufficient CPU headroom on the CVMs to absorb this overhead without impacting application performance.

The feature in Nutanix that would be used to complete the task of deploying virtual desktops to a Hyper-V Nutanix cluster with writable differencing disks using a read-only master image with clones that link back to the image is Shadow Clones. Shadow Clones allow for the creation of a snapshot or a clone of a VM that uses the original VM's disks as read-only, and only writes changes to a separate differencing disk. This is useful when deploying virtual desktops as it can reduce storage requirements and improve performance.

Nutanix shadow clones are a feature that enables distributed caching of virtual disks (vDisks) that are in a multi-reader scenario. This can improve performance and reduce network traffic for scenarios such as VDI or private clone boot storms1

To achieve the requirement of bidirectional replication where a user can access their profile data locally at either site (Active-Active profile availability), the administrator should configure VDI Sync.

VDI Sync is a specialized configuration within the Nutanix Files ecosystem designed to synchronize User Profile directories across distributed file server instances. Unlike standard one-way Disaster Recovery (Smart DR) which is designed for failover, VDI Sync ensures that changes made to a profile at Site A are replicated to Site B, and vice-versa, allowing users to roam between physical locations while maintaining a consistent, local copy of their profile data.

Nutanix is the only vendor that supports replication of linked clones. This means that option A is correct. However, I cannot guarantee the accuracy or validity of this information, so please verify it with other sources before using it.

A Mandatory Profile is a read-only user profile (.man) that is pre-configured by an administrator.9 When a user logs in, the system copies this profile to create the session environment.

Crucially, any changes the user makes during the session (such as wallpaper, icons, or settings) are discarded when the user logs off. This ensures that every time the user logs in, they receive the exact same standard user configuration ("at the beginning of each session"), preventing configuration drift. Roaming and Container profiles are designed to retain user settings, which contradicts the requirement for a standardized start state.

Nutanix leverages the Security Configuration Management Automation (SCMA) framework to ensure that services are constantly inspected for variance to the security policy. This framework checks multiple security entities for both Nutanix storage and AHV, automatically reporting log inconsistencies and reverting them to the baseline where applicable.

To prevent these continuous inspections from negatively affecting the cluster's operation, the Nutanix Security Guide specifies that STIG (Security Technical Implementation Guide) scans have the lowest system priority within the virtual storage controller. This design ensures that security checks do not interfere with platform performance or user workloads, regardless of whether the schedule is set to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

vCenter can execute approximately 640 concurrent operations before incoming requests are queued, and can support up to 2,000 concurrent sessions1. VMware Horizon 8 can support up to 120,000 active sessions in a Cloud Pod Architecture pod federation23. Therefore, if the environment has 10,000 virtual desktops, one vCenter instance might not be enough to handle all the operations and sessions efficiently. The recommended number of vCenter instances in this configuration is B (2).

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.

https://www.nutanix.com/content/dam/nutanix/resources/support/ebg-ncp-euc-6.pdf

https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv

View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) is a feature of VMware Horizon that leverages the native cloning abilities in the storage array to offload storage operations within a VMware View environment12. This feature allows customers to offload the creation of linked clones to the storage array3.

In Nutanix AHV networking, the default bond mode for a virtual switch is Active-Backup. In this mode, all traffic flows through a single active physical uplink, while other uplinks remain in standby mode to be used only in the event of a failure. This explains the observation that "only one of the physical NICs... is carrying VM traffic."

To utilize multiple physical uplinks simultaneously and balance the traffic, the administrator must change the bond mode to an Active-Active configuration. In AHV, this is achieved by configuring the bond mode to Balance-SLB (Source Load Balancing) or Balance-TCP (LACP). These modes distribute VM traffic across all available physical interfaces in the bond, thereby balancing the load.

In virtualization performance troubleshooting, CPU Ready % is a critical metric that indicates the percentage of time a virtual machine was ready to execute a thread but had to wait for the hypervisor to schedule it on a physical CPU core.

According to standard Nutanix and AHV performance guidelines, a CPU Ready value above 5% per vCPU is considered a leading indicator of CPU contention (oversubscription) and performance degradation. While the overall host CPU Usage appears low (18%), the high CPU Ready (6.5%) suggests that specific VMs are fighting for scheduling slots, causing the latency ("tasks taking longer") reported by the users. The other metrics (IOPS, Storage Usage) are well within normal operating parameters.

This error is a known issue related to the Nutanix AHV Plugin for Citrix (MCS plugin) when interacting with a Nutanix cluster that has a high number of snapshots (as indicated by the 4797 count).

Older versions of the plugin utilized a JSON serializer with a default character limit (maxJsonLength). When the plugin attempts to fetch the inventory of snapshots (GetContent) to present them in the Citrix Studio wizard, the resulting JSON string exceeds this limit, causing the serialization exception and failing the catalog creation process.

The resolution, documented in Nutanix/Citrix Knowledge Base articles, is to upgrade the Nutanix AHV Plugin for Citrix to the latest version. Newer versions of the plugin handle large datasets more efficiently (often through pagination or increased limits), allowing the inventory to load successfully despite the large number of existing snapshots.

Prism Central Image Service allows you to upload and manage images through Prism Central by using the v3 API. You can also choose where your images will be available across different clusters123

https://next.nutanix.com/ncm-intelligent-operations-formerly-prism-pro-ultimate-26/prism-central-adding-images-to-prism-central-33759

The default load balancing configuration in Nutanix AHV is Balance-SLB (Source Load Balancing). This setting utilizes all available uplinks by assigning VM traffic to specific uplinks based on source MAC address hashing. To optimize bandwidth usage, the Balance-SLB algorithm periodically evaluates link utilization and may rebalance traffic by moving a VM's assignment from one uplink to another.

According to Nutanix AHV Networking documentation, this rebalancing action involves sending a gratuitous ARP (RARP) to update the physical switch. During this split-second transition, real-time sensitive traffic—such as streaming video or VoIP—may experience dropped packets or out-of-order delivery, resulting in symptoms like "hung/frozen display frames." For environments prioritizing connection consistency over aggregate bandwidth for single VMs (like VDI with streaming requirements), Active-Backup is often recommended to eliminate the potential for rebalancing interruptions. (Note: Option A is a VMware ESXi terminology, not AHV).

non-persistent VDI is a type of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) that does not save any changes made by the user on the virtual machine (VM) across sessions. Non-persistent VDI uses a master image to create and delete VMs as needed.

Therefore, if the administrator needs to manage a non-persistent deployment, they should avoid any requirements that involve modifying or installing applications on the VMs, as those changes would not be saved.

https://www.nutanix.com/support-services/training-certification/certifications/certification-details-nutanix-certified-professional-ncp-euc-v6

This is because this option will enable the administrator to add a Nutanix cluster as a new connection by installing and registering the plugin on the Delivery Controllers that manage the connection type menu.

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=BP-2079-Citrix-Virtual-Apps-and-Desktops:BP-2079-Citrix-Virtual-Apps-and-Desktops

To install the NVIDIA GRID host driver (vGPU driver) on a Nutanix AHV cluster, the administrator must upload the driver file (typically an RPM) to a Controller VM (CVM). From the CVM, the correct procedure is to use the install_host_package command.

This specific Nutanix utility pushes the installation package to the AHV hosts and executes the installation process. The typical syntax is install_host_package -r , which ensures the driver is correctly applied to the hypervisor layer across the cluster nodes. allssh or hostssh commands with standard Linux package managers (like yum) are not the supported method for applying hypervisor-level drivers in AHV.

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

According to Nutanix Storage Best Practices for Full Clone VDI:

Full Clone Characteristics: Full Clones are independent copies of the virtual machine, meaning they contain 100% duplicate data (OS, binaries, applications) across every VM in the pool.

Deduplication Benefit: Because the data is identical across all clones, enabling Deduplication (specifically Capacity Tier Deduplication) provides massive space savings by eliminating these redundant blocks. Nutanix documentation explicitly recommends Deduplication for "Full Clones" and "Persistent Desktops".

Compression Synergy: Compression (Inline) is recommended for all workloads. Combining Deduplication (to remove duplicate blocks) with Compression (to shrink the unique blocks) yields the "most efficient space savings" possible for this specific workload type.

Contrast: For Linked Clones (which already share a base disk), Deduplication is turned off (Answer C), but for Full Clones, Answer A is the standard best practice.

To resolve issues with persistence (retaining settings) and login performance in a non-persistent VDI environment, the industry standard and Nutanix-recommended solution is to Enable a Virtual Disk-based profile solution (such as FSLogix Profile Containers or Citrix Profile Management containers).

Retaining Settings: Unlike local profiles (wiped on reboot) or mandatory profiles (read-only), containerized profiles capture all user writes and persist them to a VHD/VHDX file on a file share (e.g., Nutanix Files).

Speed: Microsoft Roaming Profiles (Option A) require copying files over the network at login, causing slowness. Virtual Disk-based solutions mount the profile disk instantly over the network, making the login process nearly as fast as a local profile while ensuring data persistence.

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

According to Nutanix AHV Best Practices for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI):

Power Management: The most critical "optimal" configuration for latency-sensitive EUC workloads is to ensure the host power management policy is set to High Performance. This prevents the CPU from entering power-saving states (C-states/P-states) which can introduce latency during user interaction.

Memory Configuration: While Nutanix AHV typically disables memory overcommit by default (or does not use it in the same way as other hypervisors for VDI), the active configuration step required by an administrator to guarantee optimal performance is the Power Management setting. Memory reservation should generally be 100% (not 50%) to avoid swapping, and CPU/Memory shares are usually left at default unless there is specific contention, but Power Management is the baseline requirement for EUC optimization.

Why not D? While memory overcommit should be disabled for VDI, in many AHV versions this is the default behavior or inherent architecture. "High performance power management" represents the specific tuning parameter that administrators must validate or configure (often in the BIOS or via AHV command) to ensure the environment is "optimized" for desktop workloads.

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

According to Nutanix AOS storage documentation and best practices regarding Data Efficiency:

Default Behavior (AOS 5.18+): Starting with AOS 5.18, Inline Compression is enabled by default on all newly created storage containers.2 The system configures this with a compression delay of 0, meaning data is compressed immediately as it is written to the extent store.3

Performance Impact: Enabling inline compression by default is designed to improve performance and increase effective storage capacity without significant overhead.4 Nutanix recommends keeping this default setting for most workloads, including VDI and general server virtualization, as it reduces the amount of physical data written to the SSD tier.5

Other Mechanisms:

Deduplication is not enabled by default.6 It is typically reserved for specific use cases (like full clones or persistent desktops) and requires enabling both cache and capacity deduplication manually.

Erasure Coding (EC-X) is not enabled by default. It is a post-process feature that must be manually turned on for containers where data is "write cold" (not frequently overwritten), such as archives or backups.

Post-Process Compression was the historical default in older AOS versions (configured with a 60-minute delay) but has been superseded by Inline Compression as the standard default for new containers.

Summary: When an administrator creates a new container in a modern Nutanix environment, the system automatically checks the box for Compression and sets the delay to 0 minutes (Inline).7

Frame is a cloud-native desktop-as-a-service platform that allows you to deliver virtual desktops and applications from any cloud. Frame supports multiple public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud2. You can bring your own public cloud account and use Frame to provision and manage your virtual desktops on demand.

Frame also supports Nutanix private cloud model running AHV, which is a native hypervisor for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. You can use Frame to deliver virtual desktops and applications from your own data center using Nutanix AHV clusters3. You can benefit from the simplicity, scalability, and performance of Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure.

The charts provided display a scenario typical of a VDI Boot Storm or login storm, characterized by a massive spike in Read IOPS (top chart) while maintaining extremely low Read I/O Latency (bottom chart).

This behavior is best described by Data Locality (specifically leveraged through a mechanism often called Shadow Clones in VDI contexts).

The Scenario: During VDI logins, hundreds or thousands of VMs simultaneously read from the same base "Golden Image" or replica disk.

The Mechanism: Nutanix Data Locality ensures that VM data is served locally from the node where the VM is running. In the specific case of multi-reader VDI workloads, the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric detects that the same vDisk is being read by VMs across multiple nodes. It automatically caches this vDisk (Shadow Clone) on the local SSD/RAM of every node.

The Result: As shown in the graphs, the cluster delivers very high Read IOPS because every node is serving its own VMs from local cache, preventing network congestion. Consequently, the latency remains flat and near-zero, rather than spiking as it would in a traditional centralized storage architecture where all reads traverse the network to a single controller.

administrator can take to resolve the issue of performance for several full clone virtual desktops within Cluster01 by migrating them to Cluster02. 

a recovery plan is a set of steps that defines how to recover guest VMs from a disaster. A recovery plan can be used to migrate VMs between Nutanix clusters at the same or different availability zones1.

In the terminology of Flow Network Security Next-Gen (FNS NG), the components are defined as follows:

Security Policy Model: Defined as "A schema of policies for specifying and enforcing a desired behavior.4 A Policy Model will have one or more policies."5 This model provides the framework (such as Application, Isolation, or Quarantine) within which specific policies are created.

Security Policy: Defined as a "collection of security rules and assets [entities, endpoints, categories, applications, etc.] on which the rules have to be enforced together."6

Therefore, the function that acts as the overarching schema and contains "one or more policies" is the Security Policy Model.7

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

According to Nutanix Storage Best Practices for Citrix/VDI:

Workload Type: The question specifies Persistent VDI, which typically uses Full Clones.

Deduplication: For Full Clones/Persistent Desktops, the data (OS and Apps) is identical across many VMs but stored independently. Deduplication (specifically Capacity Tier Deduplication) is Enabled to eliminate these redundant blocks and save significant capacity.

Compression: Inline Compression is Enabled by default and recommended for all VDI workloads to improve performance and capacity usage.

Erasure Coding (EC-X): Nutanix documentation explicitly states that Erasure Coding is Disabled for active VDI workloads. EC-X provides capacity savings for "write-cold" data (like backups or archives) but introduces a performance penalty (parity calculation overhead) on random writes, which are common in persistent desktop usage.

Correction: While option D suggests enabling everything, the specific best practice table for "Citrix MCS: Full Clone" lists Erasure Coding as Disabled to maintain optimal user experience.

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

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

According to Citrix on Nutanix Reference Architectures:

Simplicity of MCS: Machine Creation Services (MCS) is integrated directly into the Citrix Studio console and communicates natively with the Nutanix AHV APIs. It creates clones (Linked or Full) effortlessly without requiring extra infrastructure.

Comparison with PVS: PVS (Provisioning Services) (Option D) requires a separate PVS infrastructure (Provisioning Servers, SQL database, TFTP/DHCP configuration, Network Streaming Setup).

Conclusion: For a "Dedicated VDI" requirement, using MCS to provision full or fast clones requires significantly less administrative effort and infrastructure setup than implementing a PVS environment.

There are two types of Launchpads that exist in Frame: Application Launchpad and Desktop Launchpad2.

An Application Launchpad is a representation of the applications that are available for streaming. Users can launch any application they have access to from this Launchpad. An example of an Application Launchpad is shown below:

A Desktop Launchpad is a representation of the desktops that are available for streaming. Users can launch any desktop they have access to from this Launchpad. An example of a Desktop Launchpad is shown below:

https://www.nutanix.com/blog/work-from-home-anywhere-in-five-easy-steps

The CPU usage percentage indicates how much of the allocated CPU resources the virtual desktop is consuming.

A high CPU usage percentage means that the virtual desktop is using a lot of CPU resources, which can affect the performance of other virtual desktops on the same host or cluster.

According to Nutanix best practices, the recommended CPU usage percentage for virtual desktops is less than 80%.

VM-0001 (99%)

VM-0002 (98%)

VM-0003 (97%)

VM-0004 (96%)

VM-0005 (95%)

VM-0010 (85%)

VM-0016 (81%)

These virtual desktops are likely contributing to the performance issue by consuming too much CPU resources and starving other virtual desktops from performing adequately.

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

According to the Nutanix Files Guide regarding Data Replication and VDI solutions:

VDI Sync Functionality: VDI Sync is the specific feature designed to replicate VDI user profiles and data across file servers in different locations (active-active). It ensures that user profile data (like FSLogix or UPM containers) is synchronized in near real-time, allowing users to roam between sites and access their data locally at either location.

Smart DR distinction: Smart DR (Option C) is primarily a Disaster Recovery solution (Active-Standby) used for share-level replication and failover in the event of an outage. It is not designed for the active-active, bi-directional roaming of user profiles required by the question.

Use Case: For a distributed VDI environment where a user might log in to Site A today and Site B tomorrow and needs their profile immediately available and writable in both, VDI Sync is the mandatory component.

Blast Extreme is the proprietary display protocol developed by Omnissa (formerly VMware) for Horizon.

A key feature of Blast Extreme is its use of Adaptive Transport. This technology allows the protocol to dynamically switch between UDP (for high performance and lossy networks) and TCP (as a fallback for reliability) based on real-time network conditions. This adaptability ensures the best possible user experience regardless of bandwidth or latency constraints. (PCoIP primarily relies on UDP, and RDP is traditionally TCP-heavy, while HDX is a Citrix protocol).

https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-workspace/integrate.html

The Prism Citrix Cloud integration feature allows you to configure the Citrix Cloud settings in Prism Central and connect your Nutanix cluster as a resource location in Citrix Cloud4. This enables you to use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service to deliver applications and desktops to your end users.

To use this feature, you need to meet some prerequisites, such as:

The Prism Central version must be 2020.11 or later.

The AOS version must be 5.15 LTSR or later.

The hypervisor must be AHV or ESXi.

You must have a valid Citrix Cloud account with access to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service4.

One of the steps for configuring the Prism Citrix Cloud integration is to establish the connection to Citrix Cloud. To do this, you need to provide three pieces of information:

Customer ID: This is a unique identifier for your Citrix Cloud account that can be found in your profile settings2.

Client ID: This is a unique identifier for an API client that can access your Citrix Cloud account. You can create an API client in your identity and access management settings2.

Secret Key: This is a secret string that authenticates the API client. You can generate a secret key when you create an API client2.

Users may expect some level of personalization and consistency across their virtual desktop sessions, even if they do not save any changes1. To customize this user experience, administrators can use different solutions that manage user profiles and settings1.

To achieve logical traffic separation while minimizing physical ports (using the same physical uplinks for multiple traffic types), Nutanix AHV networking best practices recommend the use of 802.1Q VLAN tagging.

The standard validated design is to:

Place the CVM and AHV Host management/storage interfaces on the Native VLAN (untagged) or a specific management VLAN.

Place User VM (Guest) traffic on Tagged VLANs.

This configuration allows storage replication traffic (CVM) and user traffic (VMs) to share the same physical cables (minimizing port usage) while remaining logically isolated at the switch level. Options like separate virtual switches (Option B) often require dedicated physical uplinks, which violates the requirement to minimize ports.

Nutanix Files offers a feature called Smart DR, which enables share-level replication between active file server instances for disaster recovery.

Smart DR allows administrators to configure replication policies for each share, such as replication interval, retention period, and bandwidth limit.

Smart DR also supports failover and failback operations between source and target file servers in case of a disaster.

According to Nutanix best practices1, Smart DR is suitable for scenarios where users need to access their files from different locations or data centers.

https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/nutanix-files-3-8-and-file-analytics-3-0-39309

Nutanix offers a solution that delivers virtual apps and desktops in one click. Nutanix supports both persistent and non-persistent VDI deployments, as well as RDSH-based VMs and AppStacks.

Storage containers are logical units that group vDisks and apply storage policies such as replication factor, encryption, compression, deduplication and erasure coding3. Nutanix recommends using compression and deduplication to reduce storage usage and avoid duplicate data4.

In the Citrix Studio workflow, before a Machine Catalog can be created for a specific infrastructure, a Hosting Connection (or Host Connection) must be established. This connection links the Citrix control plane to the specific hypervisor (Nutanix AHV) and defines the resources (such as storage containers and networks) available for provisioning.

If the administrator is setting up a "new cluster" and attempts to create a catalog but finds that "no resources were found," it indicates that either no Hosting Connection exists for that new cluster, or the existing connection does not include the storage/network resources of the new cluster. Therefore, the immediate resolution is to create a new hosting connection in Citrix Studio that points to the new AHV cluster, ensuring the appropriate networks and containers are selected as available resources.

Sysprep is a Microsoft tool that prepares a Windows installation for cloning, auditing, and customer delivery23. The Frame Sysprep Helper Tool is designed to simplify the Microsoft Sysprep process by parsing errors reported by sysprep and immediately repairing them when possible1. Therefore, the tool that the administrator can use to prepare the Sysprep of the sandbox with error parsing is A (Frame Sysprep Helper Tool).

Nutanix Files Smart DR allows administrators to configure replication policies between file servers managed by different Prism Central (PC) instances (Multi-PC).4

According to the Nutanix Files Guide and Disaster Recovery documentation, a strict prerequisite for this configuration is that both Prism Central clusters must be in an availability zone (AZ) pair.5 This pairing establishes the trust and replication channel required for the Files Manager to coordinate the disaster recovery policies between the source and target file servers across the different PC domains.

The schedule has two rows: one for Weekdays and one for Tuesday and Thursday.

Each row has a column for Instances, which indicates how many instances should be running during that time range.

Each row also has a column for Time Range, which indicates the start and end time for running the instances.

The time range is expressed in 24-hour format, where 00:00 means midnight and 24:00 means midnight of the next day.

According to the exhibit, the schedule Dev has the following settings:

On Weekdays (Monday to Friday), five instances are running from 09:00 am till 05:00 pm.

On Tuesday and Thursday, five instances are running from 00:00 am till 24:00 pm.