Virtual Machine Management with AHV and Prism
What to know
AHV is Nutanix's native, KVM-based hypervisor. It is included with AOS - no separate hypervisor licence - and is managed entirely from Prism Element (single cluster) or Prism Central (multi-cluster). There is no external vCenter equivalent to manage.
You should be comfortable with the VM lifecycle: create a VM (vCPU, memory, disks, NICs attached to VLAN-backed networks), install from an ISO or image in the image service, clone it, snapshot it, and manage power/console operations. Nutanix native clones are fast because they are redirect-on-write, not full copies.
Key features:
- Templates - a Prism Central feature for standardised deployment.
- Categories - key/value labels that drive policy (protection, security, permissions).
- Affinity policies - VM-to-VM and VM-to-host affinity or anti-affinity.
- AHV HA - on host failure, VMs restart elsewhere; the HA reservation setting reserves capacity so restarts can actually be placed.
- Live migration - move a running VM between hosts without downtime.
- NGT (Nutanix Guest Tools) - installs VirtIO drivers and VSS support, enabling application-consistent snapshots, self-service restore, and file-level restore.
Traps
- Templates exist in Prism Central, not Prism Element.
- Snapshots taken without NGT are crash-consistent, not application-consistent.
- Anti-affinity is the correct answer for workloads like domain controllers that must not share a host.
- HA reservation is not the same as HA being enabled: enabled HA with no reservation can fail to restart VMs.
Rule of thumb
If a question mentions application consistency, VSS, or restoring a single file from a VM snapshot, the required component is NGT.