Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

Stargate is the service in Nutanix that plays a crucial role in managing virtual machine (VM) access to the Distributed Storage Fabric. It acts as the storage I/O path and provides read/write access to the data stored within the cluster. Stargate facilitates communication between the VMs and the underlying storage infrastructure, ensuring efficient data handling and access to virtual workloads.

The importance of Stargate lies in its ability to abstract the complexities of the distributed storage environment, providing a seamless interface for VMs to interact with the storage. Through its design, it allows for high availability and resilience, ensuring that even in the event of a failure or a change in the storage topology, VM access remains uninterrupted.

While the other options represent important components in the Nutanix ecosystem, they do not specifically manage VM access to the Distributed Storage Fabric. Storage Manager focuses on the configuration and management of storage resources, Cluster Manager deals with the overall health and status of clusters, and Data Services encompasses functionalities such as data protection and analytics. However, none of these directly handle the VM's access to the storage managed by Stargate.