My HCI Lab with Nutanix Community Edition: Part 1: Introduction

manish_jha86

Till the time I was working on VMware products, I thought there couldn’t be a better piece of technology than this. However, since I started learning about Nutanix, my thoughts have changed, and I must admit that I am in awe of this product.

To learn any new product, a home lab is the best place where you can learn things from scratch. Since I don’t have dedicated hardware pieces to deploy Nutanix, I tried my hand at Nutanix Community Edition.

In this post, I will outline some basic considerations to keep in mind when planning to use Nutanix CE and walk through the steps needed to create a lab. Also, I will discuss the possibilities and limits of using this product.

What is Nutanix Community Edition (CE)?

Nutanix Community Edition is the free version of Nutanix OS, which is used to test drive the main features of Nutanix. Nutanix CE can be deployed using existing hardware in your infrastructure or as a virtual machine in a nested virtualization platform.

One important thing you should keep in mind is that Nutanix CE is intended for internal business operations and non-production use only.

Components of Nutanix Community Edition

When you deploy Nutanix CE, you will get the following:

  • AHV (Acropolis hypervisor with virtualization management)
  • Single pane of glass control (Prism web console to manage the cluster)
  • Command-line management (nCLI)
  • Ability to create a multi-node cluster (comprising 1, 3, or 4 nodes)

So when you deploy Nutanix CE, you get AHV with a distributed file system (DSF) and access to Prism to manage the cluster (single-node or multi-node). Also, you get access to the command line to perform some advanced configuration and management tasks.

Limitations of Nutanix Community Edition

Since Nutanix CE is free, it comes with some limitations:

  • Your cluster requires internet connectivity (outgoing traffic on tcp/80 and tcp/8443) to send telemetry data and usage statistics to Nutanix through the «Pulse» mechanism.
  • You must upgrade within 30 calendar days when an upgrade is available, or access to your cluster will be blocked.
  • Nutanix CE might not work on every hardware, and there is a chance that HBAs, NICs, etc., of your physical server may or may not work. If Nutanix CE is deployed as a VM, then it works in most cases.
  • Nutanix Next account is mandatory (needs registration)
  • Only community support: If there is something wrong with Nutanix CE, you can’t log a support case with Nutanix, and you have to rely on the Nutanix Next Community to help you out.

And that’s it for this post. In the next post of this series, I will talk about my lab setup and a few tweaks that we need to make. Stay tuned!!!

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. Feel free to share this on social media if it’s worth sharing.

Leave a Reply