Nutanix Community Edition

I feel this is the right timing for this. By VMware ending ESXi FREE Hypervisor, people running their home labs have no choice – switch to another FREE Hypervisor. We have detailed the announce – Best VMware Alternatives – ESXi FREE is DEAD – and we were not particularly happy with that, but hey, the IT does not stop with that. IT guys needs to adapt to new situation and needs to find another solution if they want to run their home labs on a free hypervisor. This post is about Nutanix Community Edition. Nutanix is an “American cloud computing company that sells software solutions for datacenters and hybrid multi-cloud deployments“.

Note: I was renewed VMware vExpert (x16) so I continue to blog about VMware, DR, and IT in general.

But I just wanted to say that in my particular case I will continue to run VMware vSphere in the lab as our vExpert status allows us to use VMware licenses during 365 days. However, I will also continue to monitor other hypervisors and test different alternatives.

Nutanix Community Edition Overview

The Nutanix solution is based on an Open Source KVM hypervisor. The AHV is build on a proven open-source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) foundation and extended KVM's base functionality to include features such as high availability and live migration.

AHV comes preinstalled on Nutanix appliances and you can configure it in minutes to deploy applications.

Community Edition allows you to install single-node, three-node, and four-node clusters. If you install a cluster with 1 node only, then later want to add 2 nodes, you'll have to destroy the cluster and re-create the cluster with 3 hosts.

RAM – 32 GB or greater is recommended for AOS features such as deduplication, compression, or more user VMs.

Storage – Some Community Edition users have reported success using NVMe drives.

• 64GB Boot Disk minimum
• 200GB Hot Tier Disk minimum
• 500GB Cold Tier Disk minimum

In the licensing, Nutanix specifies that it needs access to your cluster, you need to keep the TCP ports 80 and 8443 open via your firewall ….. (hmm, do I like it?)… This might not be the like to everyone.

Quote:

To use the Community Edition, Nutanix requires the following actions and access. If you fail to meet these requirements, access to your cluster will be blocked. The cluster remains operating but you will be unable to sign in to it. Otherwise, there are no licensing file requirements as with the commercially available Nutanix products.

Download and Install Nutanix Community Edition (CE)

You'll need to register in the community forums first, then once you log in, you get to the first sticky message where you have all the info, as well as documentation (I have included the links in this blog post too for convenience).

For me, as “nested homelabber“, I'm gonna need to look and see whether

In fact, it's easy. In VMware Workstation, pick CentOS as template, for the CPU don't forget to check the virtualization engine….

In fact, I upped the specs and increased the RAM to 32Gb and CPU to 4 vCPUs. The VM is hungry…..

Update: Make sure to read the requirements concerning the disks!

Followed Jeroen's recommendations!

• 64GB Boot Disk minimum
• 200GB Hot Tier Disk minimum
• 500GB Cold Tier Disk minimum

Update: You have to add to your VMX configuration file. By default, the serials of the HDDs/SSDs are not populated….

disk.EnableUUID = "TRUE"

and restart the installer.

Then the installer nicely starts (after a while..) to this screen. I guess they will have to update it to match the new conditions …

And make sure that you SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE WHOLE EULA !!!! if not, you'll have to go back ….

So, go back and scroll down please… -:)

And then, finally, drum rolls….. waiting for all the services to start …. 10 min…

to be continued…

Links – Documentation and Guides

Getting Started with Community Edition
Nutanix Public Documentation
Prism Element Web Console Guide
Prism Central Guide (includes Installing Prism Central on AHV)

Final Words

Nutanix is around for a while. I like the techno – Nutanix Distributed File System – the key of the “No SAN” – (my post from a long time ago!!!! ) solution the fact that it uses internal disks to create a shared storage simplifies the lab architecture where you can live without a dedicated box to provide you with shared storage. By hey, don't be mistaken, I'm not discouraging you to go and buy a NAS hardware which will do the job just fine. There are plenty of options now with Synology and other hardware vendors!

Other reason I like the Nutanix solution is the fact that Veeam has a Backup version that supports Nutanix AHV hypervisor. As such, if you're VMware user and want to keep using Veeam, Nutanix might be a good way to transition while keeping your favorite existing backup vendor.

The installation of the CE isn't smooth or intuitive at all if you don't stick to the hard disk requirements, EULA scroll to the end, RAM and CPU requirements. After all that, the installer does finally its job, but the whole one node cluster is pretty “heavy” in resources (32Gb of RAM I gave to the VM…). Not sure that you can run any VMs on the top….. but hey, the test in nested environment wants this, right?

And I guess you've heard another news about VMware, that Broadcom is selling the End User Computing division (EUC). Part of the EUC is also Horizon, VMware Workstation software, ThinApp packager software…. I'm kind of nostalgic seeing this going (if the announce is true). I would be disturbing for me if I had to look for VMware Workstation software replacement … ????? But hey, it's part of the game. I started my virtualization journey by playing with Connectix Virtual PC, before Microsoft put their hands on it!

Make sure to check our other posts about Alternatives to VMware!

More posts from ESX Virtualization:

• Another VMware Alternative – Verge.IO
• How to install and run Xen Orchestra Lite
• XCP-NG Virtualization Platform with management by Xen Orchestra
• Best VMware Alternatives – ESXi FREE is DEAD
• vSphere 8 U2 Identity Federation with Entra ID/Azure AD – vSphere never sees the users credentials
• VMware vCenter Server Converter 6.4 Released
• VMware vSphere 8.0 U2 Released – ESXi 8.0 U2 and VCSA 8.0 U2 How to update
• What’s the purpose of those 17 virtual hard disks within VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.0?
• VMware vSphere 8 Update 2 New Upgrade Process for vCenter Server details
• VMware vSAN 8 Update 2 with many enhancements announced during VMware Explore
• What’s New in VMware Virtual Hardware v21 and vSphere 8 Update 2?
• Homelab v 8.0 
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• vSphere 8.0 Page
• Veeam Bare Metal Recovery Without using USB Stick (TIP)
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• A really FREE VPN that doesn’t suck
• Patch your ESXi 7.x again
• VMware vCenter Server 7.03 U3g – Download and patch
• Upgrade VMware ESXi to 7.0 U3 via command line
• VMware vCenter Server 7.0 U3e released – another maintenance release fixing vSphere with Tanzu
• What is The Difference between VMware vSphere, ESXi and vCenter
• How to Configure VMware High Availability (HA) Cluster

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