NCA 6.10 ยท Reference
Most NCA candidates come from a VMware seat. Map your existing vocabulary onto Nutanix and the whole exam lands easier. The right column is what the exam will name.
| VMware concept | Nutanix equivalent | Note |
|---|---|---|
| vCenter Server | Prism Central | Multi-cluster management plane; a separate VM you deploy. |
| ESXi host / single-cluster management | Prism Element | Built into AOS, runs in every CVM, manages just its own cluster. |
| ESXi (the hypervisor) | AHV | KVM-based, included free in NCI. Nutanix also supports ESXi and Hyper-V. |
| vSAN | Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) | Served by the Controller VM (CVM) on every node; data locality. |
| VMFS datastore | Storage container | Where you set RF, compression, deduplication, and erasure coding. |
| VMDK | vDisk | The virtual disk a VM consumes, living inside a container. |
| vMotion | Live Migration | Planned, no-downtime move of a running VM between hosts. |
| DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) | ADS (Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling) | Automatic, on by default; balances load to avoid hot spots. |
| vSphere HA | VM High Availability (HA) | Restarts VMs on surviving hosts after an unplanned host failure. |
| Storage Policy / FTT (failures to tolerate) | Replication Factor / Redundancy Factor (FT) | RF2/FT1 tolerates 1 failure (3 nodes); RF3/FT2 tolerates 2 (5 nodes). |
| VMware Tools | Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) | VSS app-consistent snapshots, Self-Service Restore, VirtIO drivers. |
| vSphere Lifecycle Manager / Update Manager (vLCM/VUM) | LCM (Life Cycle Manager) | One-click software AND firmware updates, dependency-aware, dark-site capable. |
| Standard / Distributed vSwitch | Open vSwitch (OVS), bridge br0 | Default uplink bond br0-up; CVM and host on the native VLAN. |
| Site Recovery Manager / array replication | Protection Domains + Async / NearSync / Metro | Async RPO ≥ 60 min; NearSync 1-15 min; Metro RPO 0 (stretched cluster). |
| Auto Deploy / host imaging | Foundation | Images bare-metal nodes with AOS + a hypervisor and forms the cluster. |
| Skyline / health checks | NCC + Pulse | NCC runs health checks; Pulse sends telemetry to Nutanix for proactive support. |
| VMware Cloud on AWS | NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) | Full Nutanix stack on AWS/Azure bare metal, one operating model. |