An administrator is managing two clusters registered to two different Prism Central instances. After configuring a Protection Policy for synchronous…

Nutanix Disaster Recovery's automatic failover feature relies on a Witness VM. A fundamental prerequisite for this configuration is that both the primary and recovery Nutanix clusters must be registered to and managed by the same Prism Central instance. This setup defines a single Availability Zone (AZ) where Prism Central and the Witness can monitor both sites and orchestrate an unattended failover if the primary site becomes unavailable. The scenario describes two clusters registered to two different Prism Central instances, which prevents the creation of a single AZ and thus disables the automatic failover option.

A. A VM can only belong to one Recovery Plan within a specific AZ pair; this would prevent its addition to a new plan, not limit the failover mode.
B. The question states data replication is already verified, implying necessary data path ports are open. These ports do not control the availability of the automatic failover feature.
C. A local snapshot schedule is independent of remote replication and is not a requirement for configuring automatic failover in a Recovery Plan.

1. Nutanix Disaster Recovery Guide v6.8, Section: "Recovery Plan Creation", Subsection: "Prerequisites for Unattended (Automatic) Failover". The guide states, "The primary and the recovery Nutanix clusters must be registered to the same Prism Central." This directly supports the correct answer.

2. Prism Central Guide (pc-2023-4), Section: "Availability Zones for Disaster Recovery". This document defines an Availability Zone (AZ) as a logical grouping of a primary cluster and its associated recovery clusters, all managed by the same Prism Central instance. This clarifies why two different Prism Central instances cannot support automatic failover between them.

3. Nutanix University, Nutanix Certified Professional - Multicloud Infrastructure (NCP-MCI) 6.5, Module: "Data Protection and Disaster Recovery", Section: "Nutanix Disaster Recovery". The courseware explains that the Witness service, which enables automatic failover, is deployed for an Availability Zone managed by a single Prism Central to monitor the paired sites.