NCP-EUC Questions and Answers

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 Nutanix "Omnissa Horizon on Nutanix Best Practices" (formerly VMware Horizon), Windows system services that create excessive background I/O must be optimized for VDI environments. Specifically, the Windows Search (Indexing) Service is a common cause of high CPU and disk I/O. In a non-persistent environment, if the indexing service is active, it continuously attempts to crawl the file system and update the index database during the user session. This generates a large number of small, random writes (IOPS) which land in the Flash Tier (Hot Tier/Oplog).

The behavior described—usage ramping up during business hours (as users create data/emails) and coming down during off-hours—aligns with the Curator process. Curator scans the cluster periodically (typically every 6 hours or during low load) to perform Tiering (moving cold data from SSD to HDD) and cleanup. If indexing is enabled, the "hot" index data fills the SSD tier during the day; Curator then destages this data or consolidates it during the scan. To resolve the performance impact and unnecessary flash consumption, the administrator must disable the Windows Search service or configure it correctly in the Golden Image.

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.

This is because registration kiosks are used by multiple customers who do not need to personalize their desktops or applications, and who only need to perform a specific task such as registering or checking in. Non-persistent desktops can provide a secure and consistent user experience for these customers, and also reduce management overhead for the organization.

In a Nutanix-hosted Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops environment, proper network port configuration is essential for component communication. The Citrix License Server is a critical infrastructure component that manages product licensing.

According to Nutanix Validated Designs and Citrix reference architectures for traffic flow, TCP port 27000 is the default port required for inbound communication to the License Server. This port is used by the License Server Manager (lmadmin or lmgrd) to receive communication from Citrix products (such as the Delivery Controller) requesting licenses.

The specific port breakdown for the License Server is:

Port 27000 (TCP): The License Server Manager port (Inbound communication). This is the primary entry point.

Port 7279 (TCP): The Vendor Daemon port.

Port 8082/8083 (TCP): The Administration Console web port (used for management, not licensing requests).

Therefore, to ensure successful inbound communication for licensing operations within the Nutanix infrastructure, the firewall must allow traffic on Port 27000.

https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/new-x-play-actions-in-prism-central-2021-7-40005

The Prism Central Playbook Action is a tool that allows you to automate tasks based on triggers, such as events, alerts, or webhooks. You can define a series of actions (called a playbook) that perform operations on your infrastructure, such as adding or reducing resources on a VM2.

To use the Playbook Action for VMs, 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.

The VMs must have Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) installed and enabled3.

One of the possible reasons why the Playbook Action is no longer being triggered is that the virtual desktop CPU Usage alerts were not cleared. According to the Prism Central guide3, “If an alert has been triggered once and has not been cleared yet, then it will not trigger any action again until it has been cleared”. Therefore, if the CPU Usage alert remains active for a virtual desktop, it will prevent the Playbook Action from adding more vCPUs to it.

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.

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.

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

According to Nutanix EUC Troubleshooting Guides:

Tool Capabilities: RDAnalyzer (Remote Display Analyzer) is the specific tool recommended to view real-time statistics regarding the Display Protocol (Blast/ICA/PCoIP), Frames Per Second (FPS), Bandwidth, Network Latency, and GPU Utilization in a single overlay window.

Why not GPUView? NVIDIA GPUView (Option D) is a deep-dive performance trace tool used for analyzing complex rendering pipelines and driver lag (DPCs/ISRs). It does not provide a live dashboard of "Network Latency" or "Bandwidth" for the display protocol, nor is it used for quick "real-time" monitoring by administrators in the same way RDAnalyzer is.

Note on Exam Key: While some older exam dumps might incorrectly flag D, RDAnalyzer is the only tool in the list that provides the protocol-specific network metrics (bandwidth/latency) requested in the scenario.

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.

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).

Microsegmentation is the specific functional capability within Nutanix Flow Network Security designed to control and restrict east-west traffic between virtual machines.

While traditional firewalls protect the perimeter (North-South), Microsegmentation applies stateful firewall policies directly to the vNIC of each VM. This allows an administrator to define granular rules that explicitly allow or deny traffic between individual VMs or groups of VMs (e.g., preventing a compromised VDI desktop from accessing a database server on the same subnet). This feature is the primary mechanism used to prevent lateral movement within the environment.

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

According to Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops architecture documentation utilized in Nutanix EUC designs:

VDA Functionality: The Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) is the essential software component that must be installed on every machine (virtual or physical) that delivers applications or desktops.

FMA Role: The VDA registers with the Delivery Controller (Broker) and manages the FMA (FlexCast Management Architecture) connection between the machine and the user device. It establishes and manages the HDX connection, allowing the Citrix Workspace app (on the client side) to connect directly to the desktop session.

Distinction:

Citrix Workspace app is installed on the client device (endpoint), not the virtual desktop.

VirtIO drivers are lower-level drivers for disk/network I/O virtualization on AHV, not FMA connection brokers.

NGT provides Nutanix-specific fabric features (SSR, FLR), not Citrix session connectivity.

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.

Shadow Clones are a unique feature of the AOS storage that enables distributed caching of virtual disks (vDisks) used by virtual machines1. Shadow Clones provide effective caching optimization in distributed multireader scenarios, such as large VDI and cloud deployments2.

The warning message you see indicates that Shadow Clones are disabled on your Nutanix cluster. This may affect the performance of your Instant Clone desktop pool, as it will not benefit from the caching optimization provided by Shadow Clones.

https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documents/solutions/details?targetId=TN-2100-Performance-Analysis-Nutanix-Shadow-Clones:TN-2100-Performance-Analysis-Nutanix-Shadow-Clones

Deduplication is a process that eliminates duplicate data blocks and reduces the amount of storage space required for virtual desktops. Deduplication can be enabled at both cluster level and container level on Nutanix.

Deduplication can also work with VCAI (View Composer Array Integration), which is a feature that uses Nutanix native NFS snapshot technology to clone VMs2. VCAI can improve performance and reduce storage consumption for linked-clone desktop pools.

Another feature that can help with capacity issue is Shadow Clones, which is a distributed caching mechanism that allows multiple VMs to read from a single vDisk copy stored locally on each node3. Shadow Clones can reduce network traffic and improve boot times for virtual desktops.

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

Nutanix Frame allows administrators to configure capacity settings for their virtual machines (VMs) that run virtual apps and desktops.

Capacity settings include:

Default capacity, which defines how many VMs are turned on when there is no user activity on the account. This setting helps reduce costs by turning off unused VMs.

Active capacity, which defines how many VMs are turned on when there is user activity on the account. This setting helps improve performance by ensuring enough VMs are available for user sessions.

Quick Publish, which defines how many VMs are updated with the latest changes when publishing a new version of an app or desktop. This setting helps speed up the publishing process by updating only a subset of VMs instead of all of them.

According to Nutanix Frame documentation1, Quick Publish value should be equal to or less than the active capacity value for each instance type.

If Quick Publish value is set higher than active capacity value, then Frame will ignore Quick Publish value and perform regular publishing instead.

https://docs.frame.nutanix.com/platform/admin/capacity/

This option allows you to create a custom report with the required metrics for all VMs across all clusters and send it automatically to the operations team via email4. This way, you don’t have to manually export or FTP the data every month.

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

According to Citrix App Layering on Nutanix reference architectures:

Minimizing Storage: Citrix App Layering allows an administrator to capture applications in separate virtual disks ("App Layers") that are stored once and then dynamically merged with a base OS layer to create layered images.2 This avoids the storage bloat of installing every application into a single "Gold Image" or creating dozens of unique images for every department.

ELM Role: The Enterprise Layer Manager (ELM) is the virtual appliance required to manage this layering environment.3 It orchestrates the creation of layers and the publishing of images.

Targeting User Groups: By using Elastic Layering (a feature of App Layering), specific app layers can be delivered to users based on their Active Directory group membership at login, fulfilling the requirement to deploy "different applications to different user groups" without installing them permanently in the base image.

A mandatory profile is a type of roaming profile that is read-only and does not save any changes made by users during their sessions. A mandatory profile can be applied to a group of users who share a common desktop environment and do not need to customize their settings or preferences.

A mandatory profile can ensure that a group of base settings are applied to Citrix-based VDI users at each logon, regardless of any changes they make during their sessions. A mandatory profile can also improve performance, security, and consistency of the VDI environment.

To use a mandatory profile with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, you need to create a template profile on a reference machine, rename its NTUSER.DAT file to NTUSER.MAN, and copy it to a network share. Then you need to configure Profile Management policies or Active Directory settings to point to the network share location for your users2.

For persistent desktop workloads (full clones) where data efficiency is critical, Nutanix recommends leveraging Inline Compression as the primary reduction technology. To further optimize storage capacity without the heavy memory overhead associated with Deduplication, the recommended complementary technology is Erasure Coding (specifically Inline Erasure Coding in newer AOS versions or EC-X post-process).

Erasure Coding increases the effective usable capacity of the cluster by stripping data parity across nodes (similar to RAID 5/6 logic) rather than relying on the default Replication Factor 2 (RAID 1 logic) for cold or write-cold data. Since persistent desktops often contain large amounts of static data after the initial OS and application installation, Erasure Coding significantly reduces the storage footprint. While Capacity Deduplication (Option D) is available, it is generally reserved for specific use cases (like full clone setups with high data commonality) due to its high RAM requirement for fingerprint metadata, making Erasure Coding the more universally applicable "other" technology for general persistent VDI.

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

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 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.

one of the possible causes of slower logon and application load times for VMware Horizon-based virtual desktop users is Failed to create Native clone errors. This error occurs when there is a problem with cloning virtual machines using Nutanix Native Clones technology. To troubleshoot this issue, you can check the following:

The Nutanix cluster has enough free space to create clones

The Nutanix cluster has enough CPU and memory resources to handle cloning operations

The Nutanix cluster is running a compatible version of AOS and AHV with VMware Horizon

The VMware Horizon environment is configured correctly to use Nutanix Native Clones

The VMware Horizon agent is installed and updated on the master image

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

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1008360

Citrix Studio is the primary management console for the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (or Citrix DaaS) site.7 It is explicitly designed with wizards to guide administrators through deployment scenarios, such as creating Machine Catalogs (provisioning VMs) and Delivery Groups.

It is specifically within the Delivery Groups wizard in Citrix Studio that an administrator configures the publishing of resources (such as applications and desktops) and assigns them to users.8 While Prism Central manages the underlying Nutanix infrastructure (VMs, networking), it does not handle the session brokering or the specific definition of "published resources" for the VDI users.

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

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

According to the installation guide for the Nutanix AHV Plug-in for Citrix:

Plugin Registration: The Nutanix AHV plug-in functions as a Hardware Compatibility Layer (HCL) plugin within the Citrix architecture. This allows the Citrix Provisioning (PVS) Streamed VM Setup Wizard to communicate with the AHV hypervisor.

Service Restart: After installing the plug-in on the PVS Console machine (or the DDC where the wizard is being run), the administrator must restart the specific Citrix services that load these HCL plugins. The Citrix Remote HCL Server service (often associated with the proxying of hypervisor calls in PVS/DDC environments) must be restarted to register the new Nutanix connection type.

Resolution: Without restarting this service, the PVS wizard cannot enumerate the Nutanix AHV connection or resources, rendering the integration unusable until the service reload picks up the new plugin dlls.

According to Nutanix Support & Insights3, you need to install the Nutanix AHV plugin for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Delivery Controllers (also called the MCS plugin SDK) to create and manage Citrix-provisioned VMs in a Nutanix AHV infrastructure environment. 

In Nutanix Prism Central, the reporting feature allows administrators to schedule and generate custom reports. To manage storage and database capacity, Prism Central enforces a retention limit on these generated report instances.

According to the Prism Central Guide, "By default, Prism Central retains 25 instances of each report."

In the scenario described:

The administrator had 22 reports.

Over the next week (7 days), 7 new reports were generated (22 + 7 = 29 total potential instances).

Because the total (29) exceeds the hard default limit of 25, the system automatically rotated out (deleted) the 4 oldest copies to maintain the count at 25. This explains why reports are missing despite the expectation of seeing 29.

For non-persistent VDI environments where speed and personalization are required, Container-based profiles (such as FSLogix Profile Containers or Citrix Profile Management containers) are the industry standard and Nutanix recommended solution.

Unlike Roaming Profiles (Option D), which must copy thousands of files over the network at login (causing slow logins and "bloat"), Container-based profiles encapsulate the entire user profile into a single virtual disk (VHD/VHDX). This disk is mounted instantly over the network when the user logs in. This provides the user with their personalized settings immediately—mimicking a local profile—without the performance penalty of file copying, ensuring the fast and consistent sign-in experience requested by management.

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.

one of the possible Nutanix storage efficiency features that the administrator can use for this solution is Deduplication. Deduplication is a technology that eliminates duplicate blocks of data and reduces storage consumption. Deduplication can be enabled on a per-container basis and can provide significant savings for Citrix virtual desktop deployments that use cloning technologies such as Machine Creation Services (MCS) or Provisioning Services (PVS)1.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract of Nutanix Prism Operations documents:

According to the Prism Central Intelligent Operations Guide regarding Reporting:

Precedence Rule: When configuring reports, settings can be applied at a Global level (default for all reports) or overridden at the specific Report level.

Outcome: The specific Report level settings take precedence over the Global level settings. This allows administrators to have a general standard while customizing specific reports for unique requirements without breaking the global standard.

In a Nutanix AHV cluster, resource management and Admission Control ensure that VMs are only powered on if there are sufficient physical resources (specifically Memory) available to back them.

A cluster designed to run an "average" of 800 VMs likely has its physical memory sized to accommodate that workload plus some buffer (HA). Attempting to power on 1400 VMs simultaneously (almost double the average load) on the same 6-node cluster will likely exhaust the available physical RAM. Once the cluster memory capacity is full, AHV will refuse to power on additional VMs, resulting in the state observed in Citrix Studio where many VMs remain off. Citrix network issues (Directory/Storefront) would typically result in registration failures or connection errors, not the inability of the hypervisor to power on the VM.

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.

non-persistent VDI machines are deleted when they are rebooted, logged off, or shut down. Therefore, Windows Update policy should be configured to prevent automatic updates that may trigger a restart on these machines1.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-defender-for-endpoint/onboarding-and-servicing-non-persistent-vdi-machines-with/ba-p/1360721

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).

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

The performance statistics indicate that the SSD Cache tier is 85% full, which is the primary bottleneck. In a Nutanix cluster, the SSD tier serves as the high-performance "Hot Tier" (Extent Store and Oplog) for active data. When the SSD tier utilization exceeds recommended thresholds (typically above 75-80%), the system must aggressively destage data to the slower HDD Capacity tier to free up space for incoming writes.

This destaging process and the lack of available SSD space for the active working set (WS) force read and write operations to be served from the slower Capacity tier (HDD), resulting in significantly higher latency and "sluggish" desktop performance. The vCPU ratio (4:1) and Host CPU (< 40%) are well within healthy limits, ruling out CPU contention.

This is because this option will allow the administrator to use Citrix Director to reset user profiles on a Nutanix Files share that provides high performance, scalability, and resilience3.

Citrix Profile Management is a solution that allows administrators to manage user profiles and settings across different devices and sessions12. Nutanix Files is a software-defined file storage solution that provides high performance and scalability for file data12. Nutanix Files supports all forms of profile management with efficient metadata caching techniques that optimize for faster VDI logon times12. Nutanix Files offers two types of shares: standard shares and distributed shares3. Standard shares are hosted on a single file server, while distributed shares are hosted on multiple file servers for load balancing and high availability3.

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

In Nutanix Prism Central, the Capacity Runway scenario provides details on the available capacity for the next 12 months based on the current usage pattern. This feature can help the administrator to plan and prepare the budget for the next fiscal year. The administrator can use this information to decide whether more resources need to be added to the Nutanix cluster or if the existing resources are sufficient.

https://www.nutanix.com/products/prism/prism-central

Prism Central planning tools can help you estimate the capacity runway of your cluster by considering the storage, CPU, and memory capacity. However, you need to have at least 21 days of data from a cluster to calculate the baseline runway estimates4.

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.

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

According to the Prism Central Guide regarding Reporting, predefined system reports (such as Cluster Efficiency, Environment Summary, etc.) are built-in templates provided by Nutanix. The documentation explicitly states that while administrators can view and run these reports, they cannot delete or modify (Edit) the structure of these predefined reports directly.

However, the valid action an administrator can perform on a predefined report is to Schedule it. Scheduling allows the report to run automatically at specified intervals and email the results to recipients. If modification is required, the administrator must first clone the predefined report to create a custom copy, which can then be edited; the original remains locked.

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.

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

According to Nutanix storage best practices for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), the optimal configuration for Linked Clones is Compression Only.

Linked Clones and Data Efficiency: In a Linked Clone environment, the Virtual Machines (VMs) already share a common base image (replica disk) at the hypervisor level. Because the identical operating system data is already shared via the cloning technology, the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) manages this duplicate data efficiently without needing the Deduplication feature enabled on the container.

Redundancy of Deduplication: Nutanix technical documentation explicitly states that for Linked Clones or Nutanix VAAI clones, deduplication provides no additional benefit because the data is already single-instanced. Enabling deduplication in this scenario would introduce unnecessary metadata overhead without delivering significant capacity savings.

Role of Compression: Inline Compression is recommended for almost all workloads, including VDI. It effectively reduces the size of the unique data written to the delta disks (user data, temp files, and logs) associated with non-persistent desktops, maximizing storage efficiency without the performance cost of deduplication.

Shadow Clones: For the read-heavy workload of 2000 desktops accessing the same base image, Nutanix utilizes Shadow Clones (enabled by default) to cache the "hot" replica disk locally on every node, ensuring high performance during boot storms, rendering the need for "performance tier deduplication" redundant for linked clones.

Summary of Best Practice:

Full Clones / Persistent Desktops: Compression + Deduplication.

Linked Clones / Non-Persistent Desktops: Compression Only.