Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

Which storage optimization configuration should an administrator choose for a VDI setup requiring persistent desktops?

1. Compression only

2. Deduplication and Erasure Coding

3. Compression, Deduplication, and Erasure Coding

4. Compression and Deduplication

The correct answer is: Deduplication and Erasure Coding

In a VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) setup requiring persistent desktops, the choice of storage optimization is crucial for maximizing performance and efficiency while ensuring data integrity. The inclusion of both deduplication and erasure coding strikes a balance between saving storage space and maintaining data availability. Deduplication eliminates redundant copies of data, significantly reducing the storage required for persistent desktops where similar data might be stored across multiple virtual machines. Since users might have similar applications and operating system files, deduplication can help optimize the storage footprint dramatically. Erasure Coding complements this by providing a method for fault tolerance and data protection. In environments that require high availability, it allows data to be split and encoded across different storage nodes. This means that even if a part of the storage fails, the system can still recover the data from the remaining parts. This is particularly important in a persistent desktop environment, where losing user data would adversely affect user experience. While options that include only compression or a combination of compression with either deduplication or erasure coding may provide some benefits, they do not offer the same level of space efficiency and data protection as combining deduplication with erasure coding. Compression alone may reduce the size of the data but does not address the redundancy aspect efficiently.