Today Nutanix announced the latest release of its Community Edition Hypervisor, a packaged installer including AOS and AHV. CE 2.1 includes a number of improvements and new features derived from the production releases of AOS 6.6-6.8. Nutanix in the last 6 months has put a significant effort into revitalizing the free, community supported edition of its popular HCI solution.

I’ve installed this in my home lab and the following improvements stick out the most.

1. Noticeably faster install process – It’s not ESXi, but it’s getting better.
2. Expanded hardware compatibility – My realtek 2.5Gb NIC’s are detected out of the box. No more hacking driver files post install.
3. Reduced CVM memory consumption – opening installs to systems with 32GB of RAM. Let’s be honest – the memory requirements have kept CE out of the hands of most home lab’ers. With this new reduction in CVM memory sizing, I’ve had success installing with as little as 20GB.
4. X-Small Prism Central – again, opening installs to systems with limited memory resources. This also enables a lightweight CVM option for vSphere customers.
5. Performance – it’s fast. With a basic host (6 cores, 64GB, NVME+SSD, and 2.5Gb ethernet), it’s snappy. I’ve been able to easily oversubscribe 6:1.

Overall, I am impressed. From the clunky sub 2.0 releases that felt like an afterthought – to a well-rounded, performant install – I finally feed comfortable retiring my ESXi host here in the home lab.

Read more about it here: Unveiling Nutanix Community Edition 2.1: Yes, it’s here!!

Interested in test driving Nutanix CE? Start here: Nutanix Community Edition | Hands-on Hyperconvergence

– Marc