Nutanix CE is a quick way to learn how Nutanix works. It’s easy to setup in your own lab environment; and it is now available to everyone now. Nutanix is offering a free Community Edition of its system software so that enterprises may try out the Nutanix hyperconverged/web-scale platform. They can then experience for themselves what Nutanix describes as a “webscale” experience. (Note that this is currently a beta program.)

Getting enterprise decision makers to try out a new idea is very challenging for industry newcomers, regardless of how well its technology performs or the benefits for clients. Nutanix is taking a page out of the open source community playbook and  offering enterprises the opportunity to download their software and put it to use. Nutanix points out that the software works with products offered by many system suppliers.

The CE(Community Edition) has a full blown version of Acropolis + Prism stack that enables you to not only host your virtual machines, but enjoy all the benefits of Nutanix. The features available with CE are the exact same enjoyed by paying customers, being the difference that it is a community supported edition and there is a maximum limit of 4 nodes.

Some of the features available with CE are:

• De-duplication
• Compression
• Erasure Coding
• Asynchronous DR
• Shadow Cloning
• Single server (RF=1), three servers (RF=2) or four servers (RF=2)
• Acropolis Hypervisor (all VM operations, high availability etc.)
• Analytics
• Full API framework for development, orchestration and automation
• Self-Healing
• ToR integration

 

Minimum Requirements are:

Nodes	1 – 3 or 4 nodes
CPU	Intel CPUs -> 4 cores min – with VT-x support
Memory	16GB min
Storage Subsystem	RAIDO0 (LSI HBAs) or AHCI storage sub-system
Hot Tier (SSD)	1 SSD per server is a min -> 200GB per Server
Cold Tier (HDD) (spin disk)	1 HDD per server is a min -> 500GB per Server
Networking	Intel NICs

 

Please note that Metro Availability, Synchronous Replication, Cloud Connect and Prism Central as not part of Nutanix CE.