Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Administration (ECA)

If you already have experience with administering a Nutanix environment, this course will extend, deepen, and broaden your knowledge as you grow in your career as a Nutanix administrator. Designed with Prism Central as the focal point, this course illustrates the breadth and depth of Nutanix’s centralized management capabilities and allows you to explore the wide variety of features that are available in this one, single web console. ECA is divided into four topic areas:

Who Can Benefit

• Administrators, engineers, and others who manage Nutanix clusters in the datacenter
• Managers and technical staff seeking information to drive purchase decisions
• Anyone seeking the Nutanix Certified Professional - Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI) certification

Course Content

Getting Started with a Nutanix Cluster

• Understand three-tier and HCI
• Understand the Nutanix product portfolio
• Understand nodes, blocks, clusters, and cluster services
• Get started with Prism Central and Prism Element
• Understand when to use Prism Central and Prism Element

• Hands-on-Labs
• Connecting to and exploring Prism Element
• Adding data services IP, an NTP server, and a name server in Prism Element
• Connecting to, exploring, and configuring Prism Central

Configuring Cluster Networking

• Understand AHV networking terminology
• Use Prism Central to monitor cluster networks
• Use Prism Element to explore the Network Visualizer
• Create and update subnets and virtual switches
• Understand subnet extension and network segmentation

• Hands-on Labs
• Creating unmanaged and managed networks
• Exploring the AHV network configuration
• Viewing virtual switches from Prism Element

Managing Images

• Understand the image service
• Use Prism Central to monitor, upload, import, and manage images

• Hands-on Labs
• Uploading and importing images to Prism Central
• Configuring an image placement policy

Creating VMs

• Use Prism Central to create VMs
• Use Prism Central’s self-service capabilities to create VM templates
• Use Projects in Prism Central
• Install and enable Nutanix Guest Tools

• Hands-on Labs
• Creating Windows and Linux VMs
• Installing Windows and Linux operating systems
• Installing Nutanix Guest Tools on Windows and Linux
• Creating a Project
• Exploring the Self Service Dashboard in Prism Central

Managing VMs

• Update, clone, customize, export, and apply placement rules to VMs
• Create and apply storage policies to VMs
• Create playbooks to automate common VM administrative tasks

• Hands-on Labs
• Updating a VM
• Assign categories to a VM
• Creating a snapshot and restoring a VM
• Creating a template and a clone
• Exporting a VM as an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) file
• Creating and running a playbook

Configuring and Managing Cluster Storage

• Understand AOS Storage
• Understand key storage concepts such as storage pools, storage containers, redundancy factor, replication factor, capacity reservation, and snapshots
• Understand fault tolerance and failure handling mechanisms
• Create and update storage containers
• Create and update volume groups
• Use various capacity optimization features

• Hands-on Labs
• Exploring the Storage dashboard
• Creating containers with and without compression
• Comparing data in a compressed vs uncompressed container
• Configuring volume groups
• Migrating vdisks between storage containers

Data Protection and Disaster Recovery

• Understand data protection terms and concepts
• Understand synchronous and asynchronous replication capabilities
• Create snapshots and recovery points
• Use Prism Element to configure local and remote backup and DR
• Use Nutanix Disaster Recovery to create protection policies and recovery plans
• Back up and restore Prism Central

• Hands-on Labs
• Backing up and restoring Prism Central
• Configuring Self Service Restore
• Creating protection domains and local VM restore
• Creating containers for replication
• Configuring remote sites and creating protection domains
• Performing VM migration and migrating back to primary

Securing a Nutanix Cluster

• Understand Nutanix’s approach to security
• Use the Security Dashboard in Prism Central
• Use Prism Central to configure authentication, users, and RBAC
• Implement hardening features for AHV and the CVM
• Understand policies in Flow Network Security
• Understand Data-at-Rest Encryption

• Hands-on-Labs
• Exploring the Security Dashboard
• Adding a local user
• Adding Active Directory Authentication
• Configuring Role Mapping
• Verifying a new user account
• Cluster lockdown

Migrating Workloads with Nutanix Move

• Understand, install, and upgrade Nutanix Move
• Use Move to migrate VMs
• Download Move logs

• Hands-on Labs
• Preparing a VM for migration
• Deploying a Move VM
• Configuring Move and a migration plan

Monitoring Cluster Performance

• Understand performance monitoring features in Prism Central
• Create sessions, charts, and reports
• View and manage project resource utilization
• Create custom dashboards in Prism Central
• Resource planning and capacity runway

• Hands-on Labs
• Creating a Prism Central performance monitoring dashboard
• Creating charts to analyze metrics using Prism Central
• Creating and managing reports

Monitoring Cluster Health

• Understand health monitoring features in Prism Central and Prism Element
• Get summarized and detailed health information from Prism
• Use Nutanix Cluster Check
• Collect and forward logs

• Hands-on Labs
• Using Nutanix Cluster Check health checks
• Collecting logs for Support
• Verifying cluster health

Maintaining and Upgrading a Cluster

• Perform a health check
• Use node maintenance mode
• Understand hardware upgrade and replacement tasks
• Start and stop nodes and clusters
• Add and remove nodes
• Understanding and exploring Life Cycle Manager (LCM)
• Using LCM to perform inventory and upgrades

• Hands-on Labs
• Using node maintenance mode
• Performing upgrades with LCM (with and without internet access)

Investigating and Remediating Performance Issues

• Understand alerts and events and the associated dashboards in Prism Central
• Troubleshooting issues with protection policies, LCM, security, performance, and so on
• Identify problematic or inefficient VMs
• Potential methods of remediating problematic VMs

• Hands-on Labs
• Working with Alerts
• Exploring Events