Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Native (NCP-CN)6.10 is ready to leave the beta state and exam is now open for scheduling with exam appointments starting on Tuesday, April 22
For those, who do not know, what NCP-CN is, it is the certification that measures your ability to deploy, configure, optimize, and perform administrative tasks on a Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP).
The best way to start preparing is to check the blueprint guide. You can find the blueprint guide here.
To schedule the exam, use the My Certification section on Nutanix University. Next, find the Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Native 6.10 certification and click schedule. You will be forwarded to the PSI page, where you can select a suitable date and time.
In addition, I highly recommend checking the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration (NKAP) free online course to get the knowledge on the NKP solution. Also, if you have an opportunity, I recommend visiting this course live, because it includes a lot of hands-on labs, and it really can boost your knowledge on NKP, especially if you have a poor practice experience.
Veeam released the new version of Backup and Replication software 12.3.1.1139, which includes new features and addresses major security vulnerabilities.
First is CVE-2025-23120 with the critical severity level (9.9 score) – A vulnerability allowing remote code execution (RCE) by authenticated domain users.
This vulnerability only affects domain-joined backup servers, which is against best practices, by the way.
This issue affects Veeam Backup & Replication 12.3.0.310 and all earlier v12 builds. Consider updating ASAP.
Now let’s move to the new features and fixes. I will not show everything, because the list is too big, but I will point out a few I really love.
Platform support:
VMware vSphere 9.0 readiness. The official support will be confirmed with the full testing of the GA build when it becomes available. This means that after vSphere 9.0 is out, it is better to wait for Veeam to officially support this release before upgrading the vSphere environment.
Nutanix AHV – Removed the experimental support designation for malware detection, guest file indexing, and application-aware processing, except database log file shipping, which will still be considered experimental.
Proxmox VE – Updated ProxmoxVE plug-in enables the usage of non-root users to register Proxmox, support for Open vSwitch (OVS) networking, Object Storage API (SOSAPI), Nested Pools for backup jobs scope, and brings further backup performance improvements.
Enhancements:
One I really love for vSphere is – Instant VM Recovery engine improvements deliver a 5x increased number of simultaneous instant VM recoveries: up to 1000 VMs per backup server and up to 200 VMs per vPowerNFS server.
TLS connection support for the PostgreSQLconfiguration database has been added for improved security when hosting the database on an external server.
New ISO-based update distribution reduces downtime by accelerating update installation and eliminates the additional disk space requirement on the backup server, which was previously needed for unpacking the update before its installation.
New REST API capabilities include changing existing password records, rescanning all backup repository types, downloading metadata for Unstructured Data backups, and performing backup deletion.
New PowerShell capabilities include connection to Veeam Vaults, querying, and restoring protected Microsoft Entra ID conditional access policies.
There are more than 40 additional features, enhancements, and resolved issues, make sure you read the corresponding KB.
In addition, consider updating ASAP if CVE-2025-23120 addresses your installation.
This topic is related to the previous post when we were talking about connecting to the existing Nutanix AHV appliance, but what should we do if we completely lose it or we need to restore the previous configuration? – The answer is simple: we can restore its configuration from the backup.
In this article, we will look at how to restore Nutanix AHV Backup Proxy from the configuration backup.
Did you know that you can connect the VBR Server to the existing Nutanix AHV Backup Proxy (Appliance) instead of deploying a new one in case it was removed from the backup infrastructure for some reason, or you just want to connect an appliance previously used by another backup server?
I never thought that I needed this feature until I reinstalled the Prism Central in my lab. After that, I had to remove the old PC instance from the Veeam Inventory, which requires removing the existing proxy from the configuration as well.
Next, I will provide a quick walkthrough on how to connect to the existing proxy.
With the release of Prism Central PC 2024.x, you may see significant improvements and changes in the functionality, features, user interfaces, and menus.
In my opinion, one of the major features added is the marketplace providing us the ability to deploy additional PC components, including NKE.
Although I believe that the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform is the future of Kubernetes management in Nutanix, I am still a big fan of the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine and want to demonstrate how to deploy NKE with pc.2024.x.
Let me remind you that I have a few blog posts on NKE, and all of them can be found using the NKE tag.
This year I decided to learn a bit about automation and infrastructure as code (IAC), and in this article, I would demonstrate some Terraform basics I have learned using the Nutanix Terraform Provider.
During this article, we will learn how to: 1. Install Terraform; 2. Connect Nutanix Terraform Provider; 3. Upload cloud image to the Nutanix Cluster; 4. Deploy a Nutanix Subnet, including IP-address Management; 5. Deploy a VM and connect it to the provisioned subnet; 6. Run a little cloud-init script to create a user in the deployed VM.
Update: The NCP-US and NCP-DB beta exams have reached capacity and are now closed.
The year begins with the updated Nutanix certifications! Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage (NCP-US) and Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Management (NCP-DB) were updated to version 6.10.
Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage (NCP-US) – certification related to the Nutanix Storage Services: Files, Objects, and Volumes. Blueprint Guide; Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Management (NCP-DB) – as you can guess from the name, the certification is all about Nutanix Database Services (former ERA). Blueprint Guide.
As usual, both exams are in a beta state and available totally free for the first 250 participants; just use the discounts during checkout: NCPDB610BETA for NCP-DB and NCPUS610BETA for NCP-US exam. You can find those certifications on the PSI cert lists. The last test date to test is March 2, 2025.
Did you hear about Proxmox Datacenter Manager? – The new project aims to offer a centralized overview and basic management of multiple nodes and clusters.
It was a most anticipated solution for many Proxmox users, and I believe it has a great future. For now, Proxmox Datacenter Manager is in the alpha phase, and I do not recommend using it in a production environment, but the stable version is planned for 2025, so stay tuned! You can check the project roadmap here.
Next, we will look at how to deploy Proxmox Datacenter Manager and how to connect our first cluster.
Nutanix released a new anticipated training and certification related to the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, or NKP.
First, the new course, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform Administration (NKPA), is available for free online at Nutanix University! The course is based on AOS 6.10, Prism Central 2024.2, and Nutanix Kubernetes Platform 2.12, and teaches you how to deploy, configure, and manage the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP).
For now, the certification is in a beta state and available totally free for the first 250 participants, just use the discount during checkout: NCPCN610BETA. You can find this certification on the PSI certs lists. The first test date is January 28, 2025, and you have time to prepare. The last test date is March 10, 2025.
Keep in mind, that during the beta state, you won’t get your results immediately after completing the exam. Usually, it takes a month or two after beta is over, and I can guess that the results of the exam could be at the end of April or in May.
I see that many people are interested in taking the Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Infrastructure 6.10 exam, so I decided to revamp my previous guide based on version 6.5.
This guide describes the methodology I am using in preparing for certification exams, and it could be used for other Nutanix exams as well.
Nutanix Certified Professional is the second stage in the Nutanix certification track. This certification requires the candidate to have good theoretical and practical knowledge of working with Nutanix solutions and is divided into several tracks: Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI) Nutanix Certified Professional – Database Automation (NCP-DB) Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage (NCP-US) Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Automation (NCP-MCA) Nutanix Certified Professional – End User Computing (NCP-EUC) Nutanix Certified Professional – Cloud Integration (NCP-CI)
In this article, we will look at the main topics from the Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI) exam version 6.10, and I will also share materials, that you can use to prepare yourself.
