Pearson NCSE-Core New Attempt

The Automatic sizing option in Nutanix Sizer provides a solution that meets the provided requirements and includes a default 25% growth capacity. This ensures that the initial configuration can handle current workloads and accommodate future growth without immediate additional investments​​.

For deploying 5000 virtual desktops in an active/active deployment that ensures availability during maintenance or disasters, the minimum number of nodes required is 104. This configuration accounts for high availability and redundancy, ensuring that the virtual desktops remain operational even if an entire site becomes unavailable​​.

Shadow Clones:

Shadow Clones are a Nutanix feature designed to enhance performance for read-heavy workloads like VDI during peak operations such as boot storms.

This feature ensures that frequently accessed data is available locally on all nodes, significantly reducing latency and improving read performance during boot operations​​​​.

Implementation Benefits:

Minimizes the boot time for linked clone desktops during shift changes.

Enhances overall user experience by reducing the I/O bottleneck during mass reboots

To maintain optimal metadata balance and data availability, and to meet the requirements for storage capacity, memory, and CPU cores, the recommended configuration should align closely with the existing node configurations while providing the necessary resources.

A. 2x NX-3060-G5 - 2x E5-2620v4 processors, 128GB RAM, 2x 960GB SSDs, 4x 2TB HDDs:

Adding two additional NX-3060-G5 nodes with the same specifications as the existing nodes ensures uniformity and maintains metadata balance and data availability.

This configuration provides enough additional storage capacity, memory, and CPU cores to accommodate the new workloads.

References:

Nutanix documentation on cluster expansion and the importance of maintaining uniform node configurations for optimal performance and reliability.