Exam NCA-7.5 Topic 1 Question 86 Discussion

Nutanix permits only one node per cluster to be placed in maintenance mode at a time. This restriction protects cluster availability and ensures that sufficient compute, storage and metadata services remain operational while maintenance is performed. Before entering maintenance mode, Prism verifies whether the cluster has adequate resiliency and whether the workloads hosted by the node can be evacuated or otherwise handled safely.
For AHV, the maintenance workflow migrates eligible user VMs to other available hosts. The Controller VM on the affected node is then placed into an appropriate maintenance state so that storage services can continue through the remaining CVMs. Attempting to maintain multiple nodes simultaneously could exceed the cluster' s fault-tolerance capability, particularly if another unplanned node or disk failure occurs during the procedure.
The limitation is cluster-wide, not one node per hardware block. The absence of powered-on VMs also does not authorize every node to enter maintenance mode because AOS storage and cluster-control services still depend on quorum and service availability.
NHCF/NCA reference: Cluster maintenance, node maintenance, resiliency and hardware-maintenance procedures; NCA Section 3, "Identify hardware maintenance tasks." Official references: Prism 7.5-Node Maintenance Mode , AOS 7.5-ESXi Node Maintenance .