Nutanix Community Edition 5.18 is here, and is full of new features.

Nutanix is excited to announce the full release of our ISO installation method for Nutanix Community Edition also known as Nutanix CE. The ISO supports an enhanced disk selection wizard, UEFI and Legacy boot support, and ESXi installation (with a user supplied ESX ISO hosted on an accessible internal server). Nutanix encourage everyone that wants to install Community Edition to use the ISO.

That said, some drivers for specific hardware configurations may not yet be included in the ISO, so Nutanix is continuing to offer access to the prior image-based installation method (see link at the bottom of this post). If you use the installer for the prior version, you will have to upgrade AOS and then AHV after the installation has completed in order to access the latest versions. The Nutanix CE 5.18 brings feature parity to Nutanix AOS 5.18.

Here are some of the new features, outside of the AOS 5.18 is:

• ISO Installation Method
• Lifecycle Manager (LCM) for AHV upgrades
• From now on Nutanix CE follows Production version releases.

If you are contemplating use of Nutanix for business and production use, we highly recommend engaging in an actual POC with the partner or Nutanix account teams. Community Edition is a technology demonstrator, and is not a replacement for production systems.

Nutanix Community Edition is a free version of Nutanix AOS, which powers the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform. The Community Edition of AOS is designed for people interested in test driving its main features on their own test hardware and infrastructure. As stated in the end user license agreement, Nutanix Community Edition is intended for internal business operations and non-production use only.

Click here to download Nutanix CE 5.18

Before you begin, consider that the commercially-available Nutanix NX Series systems are tuned for performance. The enterprise-ready version of AOS is bundled as the engine driving our hyperconverged compute and storage platform. You should not expect to achieve comparable benchmark numbers. For example, the NX Series systems include 10 GbE network interfaces, high core count dual CPUs, large amounts of memory, and high performance enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs).