Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

In the case of a full network failure at the primary site of a Metro Availability configuration, what happens to the VMs?

1. Automatic protection domain promotion occurs at the secondary site

2. An administrator must manually unwitness and promote protection domains

3. VMs continue running on the primary site temporarily

4. An administrator must promote protection domains at the secondary site

The correct answer is: Automatic protection domain promotion occurs at the secondary site

In a Metro Availability configuration, the architecture is designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery between two geographically-separated sites. When a full network failure occurs at the primary site, the system's automated processes come into play to maintain service continuity. The correct choice indicates that automatic protection domain promotion occurs at the secondary site during such a failure. This mechanism is key to ensuring minimal downtime. The secondary site effectively becomes the active site, promoting the previously secondary protection domain to primary status automatically. This process eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures that virtual machines (VMs) can continue to operate smoothly without significant interruption. This automatic failover mechanism highlights the resilience built into the Metro Availability configuration, allowing organizations to maintain business continuity during network disruptions. The other options imply a level of manual intervention or alternative processes that would not reflect the automated nature of Metro Availability during a full network failure. This automatic promotion effectively preserves the integrity and availability of workloads in a disaster recovery scenario, demonstrating the robustness of the Nutanix architecture for managing high-availability use cases.