Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

Why are guest VMs in a Nutanix environment experiencing high latency when nodes are at 95% SSD utilization?

1. CVMs are overwhelmed by disk balancing operations.

2. All VM read operations are coming from HDD.

3. VMs are unable to perform write operations.

4. All VM write operations are going to HDD.

The correct answer is: All VM read operations are coming from HDD.

In a Nutanix environment, guest VMs can experience high latency when nodes are heavily utilized, particularly if SSDs are operating at 95% capacity. When SSDs are saturated, it becomes increasingly likely that read operations from VMs are unable to retrieve data from the SSDs, leading to performance degradation. If all VM read operations are directed to HDDs due to the unavailability or high latency of SSDs, this can significantly slow down access times because HDDs have slower read times compared to SSDs. As a result, the VMs will face long delays while waiting for data, causing the observed increase in latency. This situation emphasizes the importance of SSD performance in a Nutanix cluster, as the architecture relies on the speed of SSDs to deliver fast data access to the VMs. A scenario where reads default to slower HDDs due to SSD saturation directly correlates to increased latency in guest VMs.