Nutanix Community Edition 5.18 has been released today!

Nutanix has released a long awaited new version of their Nutanix Community Edition platform. Download bits of this new CE 5.18 can be found in the Nutanix Next forums (login required to access forum post): https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-forum-14/download-community-edition-5-18-38417.

What is Nutanix Community Edition?

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. Community Edition is intended for internal business operations and non-production use only.

Do 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 the Nutanix 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).

Even so, Community Edition performance will be sufficient for a number of VMs per node, given enough memory, CPU, and network resources.

New Features on CE 5.18

There are several new features as part of Community Edition 5.18 of which the key ones are listed below.

ISO Installation Method

An exciting new feature is the ISO installation method for Community Edition. 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 encourages 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.

Nutanix continues to offer access to the prior image-based installation method. 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.

Lifecycle Manager (LCM) for AHV upgrades

AHV upgrades are now performed through LCM. Once you have upgraded your cluster’s AOS version, navigate to LCM in Prism, perform an Inventory and then Upgrade the AHV component.

Nutanix CE now follows Production version releases!

Nutanix has aligned Community Edition and Production versions starting with AHV in this release and coming in the next release or two to AOS as well, at which point you will no longer need to visit the forums or directly download files in order to upgrade your cluster. In addition, you will notice that the AHV version offered for upgrade aligns with the AHV version currently being used on production clusters.

 

— Have fun!