Nutanix Private & Enterprise Cloud at Home?
I am regularly asked what options there are available for trying out (‘experiencing’) the Nutanix Private & Enterprise Cloud platform. In this short post, I will list out the possibilities available at the moment that can help you with getting that hands-on Nutanix experience for either educational or professional purposes. Or just for the fun of it! 😉
1. Nutanix Community Edition
Nutanix Community Edition (‘CE’) is a free version of the Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure (‘HCI’) platform. CE is designed for people interested in checking out the Nutanix HCI (Private Cloud) main features using their own (homelab) hardware and infrastructure. CE is intended for non-production use only. I have written several posts on CE including guides on deploying it as a nested virtual machine on a VMware ESXi host or vSphere environment:
I consider Nutanix CE to be the best method of really getting into the details of the platform. There is also a possibility to deploy a Prism Central VM to manage your single or multi-node CE cluster.
You can get your own copy of Nutanix CE from here and is available for registered members. Registration is free.
2. Test Drive Nutanix Products
Nutanix offers multiple “Test Drives” on the https://www.nutanix.com/one-platform portal allowing anyone to try out Nutanix Private and Enterprise Cloud products for a couple of hours. It is possible to take multiple Test Drives of the same product and also to extend the time of already running Test Drives. These Test Drives are setup as private sessions with included guidance to help you navigate around each product. The available products for testing are the following:
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- Nutanix HCI
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- Nutanix Clusters
- Nutanix Files/Objects
- Nutanix Flow
- Nutanix Calm
- Nutanix Mine
- Nutanix Xi-Leap
- Nutanix Era
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Requesting Test Drives is available for registered members. Registration is free.
3. Nutanix Demo Environment
Last but not least, there is a “Demo Environment” available via https://demo.nutanix.com allowing for on-demand demonstrations of Nutanix products. This demo environment contains almost the same Nutanix Products as with the above-mentioned Test Drives. The key difference with Test Drives is that there are no private sessions available. Everything is shared with other demo users allowing person ‘A’ to change a setting entered by person ‘B’. The available products for demoing are almost the same as with Test Drive but with the following additions:
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- Nutanix HCI on VMware ESXi
- Nutanix HCI with Dell, HPE and Lenovo Hardware
- Nutanix Xi Beam
- Multi-Cloud Cost Control and Security
- Nutanix Karbon
- Kubernetes Management
The Demo Environment is restricted and only available to Nutanix Employees and Partners.
Thank You
Thank you for reading this post and please do not hesitate to leave a comment below.