NCP-ADS study guide
NCP-ADS · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
NCP-ADS is a professional certification exam for data center and network infrastructure practitioners. It targets engineers and administrators who design, deploy, and operate data centers - people who need to reason across physical networking, storage, protection, virtualization, automation, and day-two operations rather than specialize in a single silo. The NCP-ADS study guide has 6 sections and about 1,562 words.
01Data Center and Networking Fundamentals
Data Center and Networking Fundamentals tests the physical and virtual network underlay for an AHV/Nutanix cluster: top-of-rack switching, VLAN segmentation, link aggregation, MTU, management and data paths, and Flow microsegmentation. Expect design trade-offs, not just definitions.
261 words, about 1 min02Storage Architecture and Design
Storage Architecture and Design covers the distributed storage fabric: replication factor, erasure coding, capacity planning, failure domains, I/O path, and performance isolation. The exam expects you to size usable capacity and predict behavior during failures.
278 words, about 1 min03Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery tests RPO/RTO design, snapshots, replication, protection domains, consistency groups, backup retention, and tested failover. The focus is recoverability, not merely taking snapshots.
251 words, about 1 min04Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure
Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure tests AHV VM lifecycle, cluster placement, images, networks, affinity, HA, live migration, Prism management, and hybrid-cloud extension. You need to reason about capacity and availability, not just create VMs.
269 words, about 1 min05Automation and Infrastructure as Code
Automation and Infrastructure as Code tests repeatable provisioning through APIs, CLIs, and orchestration: Prism Central REST APIs, Calm, Terraform, Ansible, and PowerShell. The exam values idempotency, version control, secrets handling, and safe change.
261 words, about 1 min06Monitoring, Performance, and Troubleshooting
Monitoring, Performance, and Troubleshooting tests health checks, alerting, metric interpretation, log collection, and layered isolation. You must find the bottleneck and prove it, not restart services until the symptom disappears.
242 words, about 1 min