A few months ago Nutanix released a new version of Nutanix Community Edition, based on AOS 6.8.1 and AHV 20230302.101026, so I decided it might be time to try installing CE again on my Lenovo workstation, which I use as my personal lab environment.
I remember trying to install the old CE on my workstation before, but because of some incompatibility issue the setup never managed to complete successfully, so I had given in and installed VMware ESXi 8 on it.
Thanks to Nutanix Move I was able to convert all my previous lab VMs (which, as I said, were created on ESXi) to AHV (relying on another server I had available as a “bridge”), and so I could migrate everything to my workstation in just a few steps without losing a single virtual machine. Even though they are lab VMs, I spent a lot of time building some of the configurations and I would have hated having to redo everything from scratch. Nutanix Move proved once again to be a really well-made and very, very useful migration tool.
The setup of this new CE, on the other hand, went great, and now I can enjoy a brand-new installation of Nutanix CE 2.1 and use it as my personal lab, which also lets me test the new features of AOS 6.8.
Here are a few screenshots of the Prism console in my lab:
In my workstation I have a 2.47 TiB NVMe disk and a second, mechanical 3.4 TiB disk, which give me a total of 5.88 TiB of space. Clearly not highly available, but still pretty fast (since the NVMe serves as the disk for hot data).
With the 128GB of RAM available, I can comfortably run 15 to 20 VMs without any slowdown.
A little while ago I installed version 5.0.0.2 of Nutanix Files, and with Move I’ll migrate into it all the shares that currently live on a Windows File Server VM. Of course this won’t be highly available either, since I only have one host and one FSVM, but that’s not the purpose of this environment.
I can safely say that I’m particularly happy with the result. Being able to try out Nutanix solutions without paying for licenses is a priceless convenience; at work we have a production Nutanix cluster and other lab clusters, but being able to “play” with my own personal environment is definitely more convenient for me. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Nutanix (and more)!!