Full Access Nutanix NCP-MCI-6.10 Tutorials

Categories in Nutanix are used to group resources and require only a name and a value for definition.

Option A (A name and a value) is correct:

Categoriesrequire a name (e.g., "Production VMs")and a value (e.g., "Tier 1").

These are then applied to VMs, storage, and other resources forpolicy-based management.

Option B (Policy and Entity) is incorrect:

Policiesuse categories but are not required to define a category.

Option C (Service and Scope) is incorrect:

Categoriesdo not require servicesor a defined scope.

Option D (Catalog and Template) is incorrect:

These apply toself-service provisioning, not categories.

Nutanix Data Protection enforces strict snapshot lifecycle controls to ensure recovery integrity. The system prevents deletion of any snapshot that is actively referenced by a running operation. The documentation states:

“Snapshots that are part of an active recovery or restore workflow cannot be deleted until the operation completes, as they are required to maintain data consistency and restore points.”

This includes DR failover tests, restorations, or live recovery workflows. Corrupted snapshots do not cause deletion failure; the system can still delete a corrupted snapshot unless it’s attached to an active workflow. Ransomware affects guest data, not the snapshot metadata in Prism. Approval policies do not block snapshot deletion unless tied to automation policies, which is rare and would produce a different error.

Therefore, active recovery operations are the most common and most accurate cause when deletion is blocked.

The “nutanix” user is a system-level account required by the platform for internal operations, automation, cluster communication, and support access. It cannot be deleted or renamed. Nutanix security guidelines state:

“The correct method to prevent password-based SSH access for system accounts is to use Cluster Lockdown mode, which disables password authentication and enforces key-based access for all system-level CVM accounts.”

Cluster Lockdown modifies SSH configuration across all CVMs, ensuring:

password authentication is disabled

only key-based authentication is permitted

privileged system accounts such as ‘nutanix’ cannot log in interactively

Blocking port 22 is not appropriate because it would block SSH entirely, including legitimate administrative access. The “nutanix” user cannot be renamed or removed due to system dependency.

Thus, enabling Cluster Lockdown is the proper Nutanix-approved method to remove password-based SSH access for system accounts.