An administrator is configuring a protection domain for business critical applications, including SQL, Oracle, and Exchange. The administrator needs to evaluate the requirements and limitations for application-consistent snapshots. What action should the administrator take while configuring application-consistent snapshots?

To guarantee a transactionally consistent backup for a multi-tier application (e.g., an application with a database VM and a web server VM), all virtual machines that constitute the application must be placed within a single Consistency Group (CG). When an application-consistent snapshot is triggered for this CG, Nutanix uses the Nutanix Guest Tools (NGT) to coordinate with the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on each Windows VM simultaneously. This process quiesces the applications across all VMs at the same moment, ensuring that the entire application can be restored to a single, valid point-in-time without data corruption or logical inconsistencies between the application tiers.

B. Configure one consistency group for each VM. This would create separate, uncoordinated snapshots for each VM, resulting in a crash-consistent state between VMs, not an application-consistent state for the entire application.
C. Select application consistent snapshot checkbox in consistency group settings only. This action is necessary but insufficient. The primary requirement is to correctly group the application's VMs first; otherwise, the snapshot will not be consistent across the application.
D. Ensure that Windows VMs have in-guest mounted VHDX disks. Nutanix application-consistent snapshots operate on virtual disks (vDisks) attached to the VM at the hypervisor level, not on file-based virtual disks like VHDX mounted within the guest OS.

1. Nutanix Data Protection and Recovery with Prism Element Guide (AOS 6.5):

Section: Asynchronous Replication > Creating a Consistency Group for VMs

Content: "To ensure consistency for applications that run on multiple VMs, add all the VMs that the application runs on to the same consistency group." This directly validates that all VMs for a single application must be in one CG.

2. Nutanix University: Nutanix Certified Professional (NCP) - Multicloud Infrastructure 6.5 Courseware:

Module: Data Protection

Content: The courseware explains that a Consistency Group is used to group VMs that belong to the same application to take a single, application-consistent snapshot of the entire group. It emphasizes that for multi-VM applications, this grouping is essential for a valid recovery point.

3. Nutanix Prism Element Web Console Guide (AOS 6.5):

Section: Data Protection and Recovery > Requirements for VSS Snapshots

Content: The documentation lists requirements for VSS-based snapshots, which include having NGT installed and using supported disk types (SCSI or IDE). It does not list support for in-guest mounted disk files like VHDX, invalidating that option.