NCA 6.10 Study Guide · Section 2 of 4
The day-to-day: managing VMs, the resiliency features that keep them running (live migration, HA, ADS), the difference between the two management planes (Prism Element and Prism Central), and matching a use case to an AOS license tier. Maps to Module 3 (AHV), Module 4 (Prism), and Module 9 (Licensing).
AHV is Nutanix's built-in hypervisor. It is KVM-based (Nutanix hardened and operationalized KVM), and it is included at no extra licensing cost in every Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) license; a new node ships with AHV by default. Core VM operations, virtual networking, live migration, and VM high availability are built into the stack, not separate products you license and deploy.
Day-to-day VM management (create, power, clone, snapshot, update vCPU/RAM/disks/NICs) happens in Prism. The CLI equivalent is acli (Acropolis CLI) for VM and network operations and ncli for cluster-level operations.
| Feature | What it does | When it triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Live Migration | Moves a running VM between AHV hosts in the same cluster with no downtime; memory state copies while the VM keeps running | Maintenance, ADS rebalancing, node expansion, or admin request |
| VM High Availability (HA) | If a host fails, the VMs that were on it are restarted on surviving hosts | Unplanned host failure (this is a restart, not a live move) |
| ADS · Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling | Automatically places and rebalances VMs to avoid CPU/storage hot spots | Continuously; ADS is automatic and on by default for every AHV cluster |
| Prism Element (PE) | Prism Central (PC) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Built into AOS, runs inside every CVM | A separate VM (or scale-out VM cluster) you deploy after the cluster is up |
| Scope | Manages only its own single cluster | Manages many clusters across sites from one screen |
| Upgrades | Rides along with AOS via LCM | A separate component with its own upgrade path |
| Extras | Core configure / manage / monitor | Categories, multi-cluster views, and the higher-tier automation/operations features |
| Tier | Headline scope | Representative features |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | Small/entry, up to 12 nodes per cluster | RF2, compression and deduplication, async replication (RPO ≥ 1 hour), lifecycle management |
| Pro | Larger deployments, richer data services | More than 12 nodes, RF3, erasure coding, VM flash-mode pinning, multi-site replication, GPU passthrough |
| Ultimate | Mission-critical / advanced | Advanced replication (Metro, NearSync, cross-cluster migration), encryption (data-at-rest, native KMS), microsegmentation (Flow), multiple managed Kubernetes clusters |
AHV is the free, KVM-based, built-in hypervisor. Live Migration moves running VMs with no downtime; HA restarts VMs after a host fails; ADS auto-balances load. Manage one cluster in Prism Element (built into AOS), many clusters in Prism Central (a separate VM). Match the feature need to the AOS tier: Starter, Pro, or Ultimate.
1. A host fails unexpectedly. Which feature brings the VMs back, and is it a live move or a restart?
2. You need to manage four clusters in three sites from one console. PE or PC?
3. Is AHV a separately licensed hypervisor? Where does it come from?
4. A customer needs Metro Availability and data-at-rest encryption. Which AOS tier?
5. Which feature automatically avoids hot spots by rebalancing VMs?