NPS study guide
NPS · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Nutanix Platform Specialist (NPS) credential is aimed at IT professionals who design, deploy, and operate Nutanix hyperconverged environments day to day - typically systems administrators, virtualization engineers, and data-centre operations staff who already touch AHV, Prism, and the cluster's storage layer rather than candidates meeting the platform for the first time. The exam tests breadth across the whole stack rather than deep specialisation in one corner: how a cluster is architected and how nodes, disks, and metadata interact; how the distributed storage fabric stores and protects data through replication and policies; how virtual networking and the virtual switch are configured and segmented; how VMs are created, migrated, and retired on AHV; how Prism Element and Prism Central divide management responsibilities; and how to read cluster health signals, raise support cases, and work through a fault methodically. The NPS study guide has 6 sections and about 1,801 words.
01Nutanix Core Architecture and Cluster Components
Every Nutanix node runs a hypervisor (AHV, ESXi, or Hyper-V) and a Controller VM (CVM). The CVM owns the node's local disks - the hypervisor itself never writes directly to them - and pools them with the disks of every other node into a single Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF).
321 words, about 2 min02Distributed Storage Fabric and Data Protection
A vDisk is the unit the hypervisor sees. DSF divides it into vBlocks and stores the pieces as extents spread across nodes, so no single node holds a complete vDisk.
327 words, about 2 min03Networking and Virtual Switch Configuration
AHV networking is built on Open vSwitch. Every host has a default bridge, br0, which carries the host management IP, the controller VM's IP, and VM traffic unless you separate them.
301 words, about 2 min04AHV Virtualization and VM Lifecycle Management
AHV is Nutanix's native KVM-based hypervisor, managed by the Acropolis service inside the CVM. There is no external vCenter and no datastore to format: a VM's disks are vDisks in a storage container, thinly provisioned and reachable from every host.
303 words, about 2 min05Prism Element and Prism Central Management
Prism Element is the management plane of a single cluster: hardware, storage, VMs, alerts, tasks, health, and that cluster's REST API. Prism Central is a separate VM, or a cloud-hosted instance, that registers many clusters and adds cross-cluster features - categories, projects, self-service, reporting, and products such as Calm, Flow, and NCM.
260 words, about 1 min06Cluster Health, Support, and Troubleshooting
Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) runs a library of read-only health checks across the cluster and reports pass/fail with guidance. It does not remediate anything.
289 words, about 1 min