An administrator needs to protect a group of mission-critical virtual machines.

A required RPO of 5 minutes immediately points to NearSync replication, because Nutanix documents NearSync protection policies as supporting recovery points in 1–15 minute intervals. The second requirement—automatically protect new mission-critical VMs—points to a Protection Policy approach in Prism Central, because protection policies can use categories and policy-based assignment to scale protection dynamically as new matching VMs are added. Combining those two requirements makes Protection Policy with NearSync replication the correct answer. ( Nutanix )

Protection Domains can support NearSync in older or alternate workflows, but the phrase “new mission critical VMs should be automatically protected” is the clue that pushes this question toward policy-based protection rather than manually maintained membership. Asynchronous replication also fails the first requirement because its RPO target is not the 5-minute class represented by NearSync. Nutanix’s modern DR design encourages policy-driven protection for scalable, category-based administration. Therefore B is the best fit for both the RPO and automatic-inclusion requirements. ( Nutanix )