A Prism Central administrator attempts to power on a new AHV VM. The cluster reports low CPU utilization and the target host shows available CPU, but placement fails with an insufficient resources error. What is the most likely cause?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of placement like seating at a restaurant: free tables don’t matter if the private dining room is already reserved. You can see spare CPU, but if memory reservation is already committed, the scheduler won’t place the VM. Check memory reservations and host capacity before blaming CPU.
Full Explanation
Nutanix placement decisions compare a VM’s configured resource requirements against the host’s schedulable capacity, which accounts for both used resources and committed reservations. CPU and memory are evaluated separately, so a host can display low CPU utilization yet still fail placement when the requested memory reservation cannot be satisfied because existing reservations consume the host’s memory pool. The scheduler blocks the VM to prevent memory oversubscription, which protects performance and avoids unstable workloads. A fully allocated CPU reservation pool is a different failure condition and would be visible as a CPU constraint, not a CPU-available mismatch. Insufficient storage capacity prevents VM creation or disk provisioning, but it does not explain a placement failure when CPU appears available. A Flow network policy or VLAN mismatch can prevent network attachment or migration, yet it is not a resource placement constraint based on host CPU or memory. Exam caveat: do not equate low utilization with schedulable capacity; reservations and configured limits matter. Operational check: compare the VM’s memory reservation with the host’s available reserved-memory capacity in Prism Central or AHV CLI output, then increase host capacity or reduce the reservation.