To load-balance a volume-group with four vDisks across multiple Controller Virtual Machines (CVMs) for a VM using Nutanix Volumes, the administrator mustenable load-balancing for the volume-group using acli. Nutanix Volumes supports iSCSI-based block storage, and load-balancing ensures that I/O traffic from the VM is distributed across multiple CVMs, improving performance and scalability. The acli (AHV Command-Line Interface) is the tool used to configure this setting for volume-groups.
TheNutanix Unified Storage Administration (NUSA)course states, “Nutanix Volumes supports load-balancing of iSCSI traffic across CVMs, which can be enabled for a volume-group using the acli command to ensure optimal performance for VMs.” The specific command in acli allows the administrator to enable load-balancing, distributing the iSCSI sessions for the volume-group’s vDisks across the available CVMs in the cluster. This ensures that the VM’s I/O requests are handled by multiple CVMs, preventing any single CVM from becoming a bottleneck.
TheNutanix Certified Professional - Unified Storage (NCP-US)study guide further elaborates that “to enable load-balancing for a volume-group, the administrator can use the acli vg.update command with the enable_load_balancing=true option, ensuring that iSCSI traffic is distributed across CVMs for better performance.” This is particularly important for volume-groups with multiple vDisks, as in this case with four vDisks, to optimize I/O distribution.
The other options are incorrect:
Enable load-balancing for the volume-group using ncli: The ncli (Nutanix Command-Line Interface) is used for cluster-wide configurations, but load-balancing for volume-groups is specifically managed via acli, which is tailored for AHV and volume-group operations.
Select multiple initiator IQNs when creating the volume-group: Initiator IQNs (iSCSI Qualified Names) are used to authenticate and connect initiators to the volume-group, but selecting multiple IQNs does not enable load-balancing across CVMs.
Select multiple iSCSI adapters within the VM: Configuring multiple iSCSI adapters in the VM is a client-side configuration that can help with multipathing, but it does not control load-balancing across CVMs, which is a cluster-side setting.
The NUSA course documentation highlights that “enabling load-balancing via acli for a volume-group ensures that iSCSI traffic is distributed across multiple CVMs, optimizing performance for VMs with direct-attached volumes.”
[References:, Nutanix Unified Storage Administration (NUSA) Course, Section on Nutanix Volumes: “Configuring load-balancing for volume-groups.”, Nutanix Certified Professional - Unified Storage (NCP-US) Study Guide, Topic 2: Configure and Utilize Nutanix Unified Storage, Subtopic: “Nutanix Volumes load-balancing with acli.”, Nutanix Documentation (https://www.nutanix.com), Nutanix Volumes Administration Guide: “Enabling load-balancing for volume-groups using acli.”, ]