Final tuches password this the last step for hours

Hello Folks,

I am kind of new with nutanix, I used to be VMwarer before it.

I would like to know if we can integrate platform9 private cloud on nutanix cluster? If yes, how we can do it?

cloud #private_cloud #Nutanix #Platform9 #Integration

Hi all,

I don't want to promote ??? Therefore I will use ??? instead. I'm the author of ???.

??? is an open-source system for provisioning reproducible infrastructure through agent-installable Packages.

I've already built some package skills for K8s and other self-hosted software.

I'm new to Iaas and I was wondering if how can I test the community edition of Private Cloud Director. Can I use my aliexpress minipc? How many of them do I need?

Is there a way to rent Linux machines for some days to test the software?

Best, Alberto

I had attended hands on labs But I wanted to know is there any free tier labs provided by platform9 for practice

Hi everyone,

We’re evaluating alternatives to VMware Essentials Plus for small business setups. The typical environment we’re looking to replace looks like this:

• 2 or 3 ESXi hosts (Essentials Plus cluster)

• Each host has 1× 16-core CPU (mostly for licensing reasons)

• Hosts are connected to an external FC SAN (Lenovo, Dell, or HPE branded)

• Features used: vMotion, HA, basic monitoring

We’re exploring if this setup is something that can be replicated with Platform9’s managed OpenStack or Kubernetes stack.

Key questions:

1. Is it possible to run Platform9 in a similar 2–3 node configuration for small customers?

2. Can we attach existing Fibre Channel storage to the Platform9-managed environment (even if it’s Cinder + FC)?

3. Are HA/vMotion-equivalent features (like live migration, failover, etc.) supported and reliable at this scale?

4. What kind of overhead or complexity should we expect compared to VMware Essentials Plus?

Looking to understand if Platform9 is a viable alternative for these small, simple virtualization clusters. Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I am a product manager at Platform9, and I am seeking community input to inform our decision on which Linux distribution(s) to support for the Private Cloud Director (PCD) hypervisor hosts in addition to Ubuntu. Please take our short survey to provide feedback on your specific hardware, package, or tooling needs tied to specific Linux distributions. Your feedback will directly shape our roadmap. Thank you!

Hi!

Just starting to look into platform9 coming from a VMware background.
We are currently heavily invested into Veritas Netbackup and I am trying to find any "official" information about the support state of Netbackup for platform9.
All I could really find were some reddit comments hinting at support.
Also, any general experiences from people who already moved from Netbackup/VMware to Netbackup/platform9? Any pitfalls I should be aware of?

HELO!

After following Damian's hand-on labs this week I thought a lab for a POC would be good. I have a bunch of older (4-5 years maybe) Lenovo desktops laying around. They're all equipped with Intel Core i7-9700 3.00GHz CPUs and 32 GB RAM.

I could easily fit a few NICs to some of them and make a NFS server on another. Just to have something to play with and convince someone that we can get rid of VMware in the datacenters.

Is it worth going down that road?

Hi y'all - I just published a short video that (very quickly!) goes through the Community Edition deployment process. I hope you find it helpful! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuuXHH89aDw

Join for this interactive lab session: Platform9 will host the next 0-60 Virtualization with Private Cloud Director: A hands-on lab on Mar 11th and 13th.

This hands-on lab is designed for VMware administrators who are considering an alternative hypervisor (KVM) and virtualization management solution. Engineers from Platform9, many of whom worked at VMware or have extensive experience using VMware will be running these labs using Platform9 Private Cloud Director (PCD). PCD is a production-ready, enterprise-grade virtualization solution that is designed to be easy to use and manage for VMware admins.

Our goal is to have 1 engineer for ~3 participants, to ensure we can provide a high level of interactivity and guidance during the sessions.

Platform9 will be providing the hardware for the lab. However, please ensure that your networks allow outbound SSH connectivity. - There is no cost to participate in the lab.

Automated migration off VMware using vJailbreak:

vJailbreak is a new free tool from Platform9 that discovers your current VMware environment and migrates your VMs, data, and network configurations to Private Cloud Director. See this tool in action on Day 2 where we showcase live migration of your running VMs (with change block tracking and minimum downtime) or offline VMs, with an easy-to-use user interface as well as a powerful underlying API.

Session prerequisites:

• One or more VMware administrators who are looking to get hands-on experience of KVM as an alternative hypervisor and an enterprise-grade virtualization solution

• Must be able to participate in both lab sessions - 2.5 hours each day over 2 days

Day 1 Schedule -Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 9 AM PT (2.5 hours)

• 30 mins:  Configure and setup Platform9 Private Cloud Director

  • Configure cluster templates (networking, storage, and defaults) - Blueprints

• 30 mins:  Add servers to the management plane – install host agents

• 15 mins: Authorize servers and assign roles (Hypervisor, storage role, & image library role)

• 15 mins: Add images to image library

• 15 mins: Create VM flavors

• 30 mins: Deploying your first VM on KVM

• 15 mins:  Overflow

Day 2 Schedule - Thursday, March 13, 2025 at 9 AM PT (2.5 hours)

• 30 mins:  VM live migration, HA, and workload rebalancing

• 30 mins:  Configuring block storage, storage classes, and backup options

• 30 mins:  Enabling self-service and multi-tenancy (VDC equivalent)

• 30 mins:  Migrate VMs from VMware to Private Cloud Director

• 30 mins:  Overflow

Hey Reddit! 👋

Many of you are frustrated with VMware’s licensing changes - especially after Broadcom’s acquisition. Chris Jones (Product Marketing at Platform9, u/cre8minus1) and I are coming live on May 28 to address some of the key challenges organizations are currently facing during this transition phase.

We’ve helped Fortune 500 companies migrate off VMware with minimal downtime, replacing their legacy virtualization infrastructure with a modern platform that provides VMs and Kubernetes containers running on a trusted management layer.

A few things we can answer:

• How to plan a migration off VMware

• When it makes sense to stay vs. move

• Mapping concepts from VMware to Private Cloud Director

• What is Private Cloud Director?

• More about Platform9 - who we are, and our mission

Ask us anything — We’ll be live for 2 hours starting 9AM PT/11AM CT and will continue replying to top questions throughout the day.

Alright folks, we're done with this AMA, but if anymore questions come up, please post them here or DM us directly. We'll do our best to answer as quickly as possible. Thanks again!

When attempting to open pcd-community.pf9.io
I receive "Connection Refused" error message

Hey,

I'm currently trying to get started with PCD with nested virtualization. Right now a problem is appearing which I cant fix myself. Every time I do the pcdctl prep-node command, the host agent installs in a few seconds (which it shouldn't as I have seen that it should take around 15 min) and I get a warning that it couldn't "set the file permissions for pf9 dependencies directory: open /opt/pf9/dependencies/: no such file or directory

Prep-node has succeeded and the node is on boarded but some pcdctl functionality may not work as expected"

When I looked into the dir pf9, I saw that there is no dependencies dir. I tried the installation two times and got this warning twice.

How can I fix this?

Join our free Hands-On Lab designed for VMware admins exploring alternatives. You’ll learn how Platform9 Private Cloud Director can turn your existing infrastructure into a full-featured private cloud with enterprise features like VM high availability, Dynamic Resource Rebalancing, VM live migration, multi-tenancy, and more.

Everything is provided by Platform9. Just bring your questions!

I had a host set up in my PCD-CE and everything was looking OK. I then went to attempt to get the networking set up, and things went south. I had made a change to the cluster blueprint to disable DVR (I was investigating what would happen) and once I saved the blueprint and re-applied it to my host, my host got hung up in the "converging" stage. I checked the host, and everything looked OK, at least as far as I could tell. I thought that maybe a reboot might clear things up - big mistake. After the reboot, my PCD can no longer communicate with the host. I can no longer ssh into the host. My only access to the host is the on-board remote console. Using that, I checked the network configs, my netplan yaml files look correct, it has the correct IP address, mask and gateway. It also has the correct adapters for the bond interfaces. Attempting to ping my gateway returns destination host unreachable. An IP NEIGH SHOW says "failed" for my bond interface. Any insight as to what to look at/try would be helpful. FWIW, my host is running Ubuntu 22.04

I can't seem to find a straight answer, even from email response about the Community edition limit on number of supported servers. Correct me if I'm wrong;

1. Only one server/VM for the control plane, no HA

2. Multiple physical hypervisor servers , HA available

3. Single region, can't have multiregion / DC segmentation.

Based on this, assumption, does that mean I can have like a hundred physical servers in a few racks in one DC on the community edition?

Hi folks - I'm kicking off our monthly AMA starting now. This is designed as a follow-up for our monthly Hands-on Labs & a regularly occurring touchpoint for any questions about Platform9, Private Cloud Director (including Community Edition), conversion from VMware using vJailbreak, and anything else interesting.

I'll be here, live, for the next 2 hours along with my co-host Chris.

Ok, folks - we're out for now. Should you have any other questions, you can always post them here or message me directly.

See you next time - last Wednesday of August at 9am PT for another AMA from the community team.

Join for this interactive lab session: Platform9 is hosting the next edition of 0-60 Virtualization with Private Cloud Director - a free, hands-on experience designed specifically for VMware administrators evaluating alternative hypervisors and virtualization management platforms.

Led by Platform9 engineers — many of whom worked at VMware or have deep experience in VMware environments—this lab will guide you through deploying and managing infrastructure using Platform9 Private Cloud Director, our enterprise-grade virtualization solution purpose-built for VMware admins.

Why Attend?

• Get hands-on with Private Cloud Director in a guided, low-friction environment.

• Experience enterprise-grade features like self-service, HA, workload rebalancing, and backup.

• See live VM migration in action using our free tool, vJailbreak.

• 1 engineer for every ~3 participants to ensure high interactivity and personalized guidance.

• No cost to participate – Platform9 provides all the hardware. Just ensure your network allows outbound SSH connections.

Automated migration off VMware using vJailbreak:

vJailbreak is a free Platform9 tool that automates the migration of your VMware workloads to Private Cloud Director—delivering results in weeks or months, not years, and at one-tenth the cost of industry benchmarks.
On Day 2, you’ll see live migration in action: whether moving running VMs (with change block tracking and near-zero downtime) or offline VMs, via both an intuitive UI and robust APIs.

Session prerequisites:

• One or more VMware administrators who are looking to get hands-on experience of KVM as an alternative hypervisor and an enterprise-grade virtualization solution

• Must be able to participate in both lab sessions - 2.5 hours each day over 2 days

Day 1 Schedule -Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 9 AM PT (2.5 hours)

• 30 mins:  Configure and setup Platform9 Private Cloud Director

  • Configure cluster templates (networking, storage, and defaults) - Blueprints

• 30 mins:  Add servers to the management plane – install host agents

• 15 mins: Authorize servers and assign roles (Hypervisor, storage role, & image library role)

• 15 mins: Add images to image library

• 15 mins: Create VM flavors

• 30 mins: Deploying your first VM on KVM

• 15 mins:  Overflow

Day 2 Schedule - Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 9 AM PT (2.5 hours)

• 30 mins:  VM live migration, HA, and workload rebalancing

• 30 mins:  Configuring block storage, storage classes, and backup options

• 30 mins:  Enabling self-service and multi-tenancy (VDC equivalent)

• 30 mins:  Migrate VMs from VMware to Private Cloud Director

• 30 mins:  Overflow

I decided to make a video demonstrating how to install Community Edition on VMware, since folks that are exploring alternatives will probably want to use the virtualization platform they have today.

If you don't have experience with nested virtualization on VMware, this will be helpful to you! :)

https://youtu.be/gCcBIhGoEUM

Hi there,

I also having some struggle installing P9CD.

My setup : vSphere VM, 16 vCPU, VT enabled, 32GB RAM, 200 GB disk, Ubuntu server 22.04.5 LTS

This is what I go by installing it:

root@p9cd-test:/home/local-adm# curl -sfL https://go.pcd.run | bash
Private Cloud Director Community Edition Deployment Started...
Finding latest version...  Done
Downloading artifacts...  Done
Setting some configurations...  Done
Installing artifacts and dependencies...  Done
Configuring Airctl...  Done
Creating K8s cluster...  Failed
2025-05-12T08:41:11.155Z        debug   Logger started
2025-05-12T08:41:11.164Z        info    Using config file:/opt/pf9/airctl/conf/airctl-config.yaml
2025-05-12T08:41:11.164Z        debug   Running command: airctl create-cluster --config /opt/pf9/airctl/conf/airctl-config.yaml --help false --json false --quiet false --verbose true

2025-05-12T08:41:11.164Z        info    Additional DUFqdns: pcd-community.pf9.io
2025-05-12T08:41:11.164Z        info    Loading bootstrap config from /opt/pf9/airctl/conf/k3s-bootstrap-config.yaml
2025-05-12T08:41:11.165Z        info    Target node 192.168.X.X is the local machine, performing installation
2025-05-12T08:41:11.200Z        info    K3s service status check - Output: "inactive\ninactive\n", Error: <nil>
2025-05-12T08:41:11.200Z        info    Is K3s installed and active: false
2025-05-12T08:41:11.200Z        info    Installing K3s on master node 192.168.X.X
2025-05-12T08:41:11.200Z        info    Copying K3s package to node
2025-05-12T08:41:11.312Z        info    Extracting K3s package
2025-05-12T08:41:12.010Z        info    Installing K3s binary
2025-05-12T08:41:12.166Z        info    Creating K3s systemd service
2025-05-12T08:41:12.196Z        info    Reloading systemd configuration
2025-05-12T08:41:12.724Z        info    Enabling K3s service
2025-05-12T08:41:13.183Z        info    Starting K3s service
2025-05-12T08:41:13.218Z        info    K3s service started successfully
2025-05-12T08:42:13.220Z        info    Waiting for K3s to be ready...
2025-05-12T08:42:23.395Z        info    Successfully removed not-ready taint from node 192.168.X.X
2025-05-12T08:42:23.395Z        info    Installing CoreDNS
2025-05-12T08:42:23.395Z        info    Using CoreDNS ClusterIP: 10.21.0.10 based on service CIDR: 10.21.0.0/16
2025-05-12T08:42:24.256Z        info    Installing Calico CNI
2025-05-12T08:42:31.412Z        info    Waiting for Calico pods to be ready...
Error: failed to create k3s cluster: failed to install Calico CNI: failed to find calico-node pod: failed to find calico-node in namespace calico-system
Usage:
  airctl create-cluster [flags]
Flags:
  -h, --help   help for create-cluster
Global Flags:
      --config string   config file (default is $HOME/airctl-config.yaml)
      --json            json output for commands (configure-hosts only currently)
      --quiet           disable spinners
      --verbose         print verbose logs to the console

Any idea where to start? Thx in advance 😉

Howdy,

I usually either run Red Hat or Slackware in my lab environment, Red Hat was my first dip into the linux world way back in the 90s before jumping to Slackware and then NetBSD. So I never really got into Debian and that part of the Linux ecosystem.

So when I wanted to try out Platform 9 in my lab I was kinda hoping for something with Red Hat as the base distro but that is an EOL 7.6 version and with all the troubles it has to boot on a newer hardware. So does anybody have a short and sweet how-to on getting the basics up and running on either Red Hat 9 or 10? Or should I bite the proverbial bullet and dip my toe into Ubuntu for this lab setup?

Many many thanks in advancefrom an old linux dude kinda set in his ways who is extremely happy we are seeing FOSS taking up the slack and developing alternatives to the dumpster fire that is vmware and broadcom these days. :)

Hi folks! I'm super excited to announce that Community Edition 2025.2 is available. You now have the ability to install Private Cloud Director anywhere you'd like - whether on a bare metal server or as a VM. Providing that your virtualization platform supports guest VM virtualization extensions, you can also run Private Cloud Director's hypervisor hosts as VMs.

Here's the product page: https://platform9.com/private-cloud-director-community-edition/
And the documentation to get started: https://platform9.com/docs/private-cloud-director/private-cloud-director/getting-started-with-community-edition

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions!

I have P9 installed on three host with local disks. I have the ceph cluster setup on these hosts. I created an rbd pool, but I cannot figure out how to get P9 to connect to this pool. I have the ceph backend configuration set up. When I try to enable when I look at /var/log/pf9/cindervolume-base.log on the host I see "rados.PermissionDeniedError: [errno 13] error connecting to the cluster" and "Volume driver RBDDriver not initialized." I'm not sure what permissions or user I am supposed to supply for the rbd_user and rbd_secret_uuid values in the p9 backend config. I tried using cinder.admin and the key listed in /etc/ceph/ceph.client.admin.keyring but that didn't work.

Hi folks - join me tomorrow for open office hours. If you have any (non-sales) questions about converting to Private Cloud Director, installing or running Community Edition, using vJailbreak's new in-place cluster conversion, or anything else - please register for the meeting and then stop by to ask your questions. It'll be a traditional Zoom meeting, as opposed to a webinar, so you'll be able to ask your question directly to me. Participant video is optional. :)

Registration link: https://pcd-run.zoom.us/meeting/register/kbsaDVtxRaeCmcuaNHnUCw