An administrator is tasked with ensuring the VMs do not experience downtime during an upcoming network maintenance on the primary cluster. The VMs are protected by a Protection Policy and are configured under a Recovery Plan. What failover mechanism should the administrator use to ensure the VMs are available on the target cluster before the maintenance window?

Planned Failover performs a controlled, graceful migration that fully synchronizes protected VMs, powers them on at the recovery cluster, and optionally shuts them down on the source. Because the target VMs are already running before the maintenance begins, no downtime is seen when the primary network is taken offline.

A. Unplanned Failover starts immediately without final sync and is intended for unexpected outages, risking data loss and VM pause.
C. Validate Recovery Plan only checks configuration; it does not power on VMs at the target.
D. Test Failover isolates recovery VMs in a fenced network for validation, not for production continuity.

1. Nutanix Data Protection & Disaster Recovery Guide v6.5, “Performing a Planned Failover”, p. 132–134.

2. Nutanix University NCP-BC Courseware Module 5, “Failover Types and Use-Cases”, slide 18.

3. Nutanix Leap Admin Guide v6.5, section 6.3.1 “Planned vs. Unplanned Failover”.