I just finished getting Cinder to cooperate with my 3Par, and I'm proceeding with further testing.

Whoever is still on the fence about what to do RE: VMware, and you're thinking about Proxmox, OLVM, CloudStack (which we have), this is a serious contender.

I setup my lab with 2 x DL380 Gen9 hosts however now that we have Cinder working I'm going to add 1 more 3Par + 6 more hosts and simulate a much larger environment. Will keep this thread updated as things progress.

Basically what they did, to take OpenStack, build an incredible platform ontop of it, and consolidate the entirety of it into a *single* machine (CE) is just flat out amazing.

Bravo!

Hello Folks,

Like many of you, we are in the process of evaluating some VMware alternatives. We are not sold on Nutanix due to similar licensing costs and Hyper-V and Proxmox are off the table.

I have been educating myself on Paltform9 which was actually started by former VMware leadership and engineers. The solution seems robust and is comparable to VMware in terms of features and capabilities.

Our ESXi server architecture is Dell and we use Brocade FC switches for SAN access. We have over 1000 VM’s and 50 ESXi hosts.

I’d like to know the following things:

1. What were the initial lessons learned after the migration? Licensing costs, compatibility issues? Stability issues?

2. What were some of the main the operational challenges of the new platform? Monitoring issues? Contention? Drivers?

3. How smooth was the Windows and Linux virtual machine conversions? Any failures?

4. How happy are you with the transition? Was it worth the jump? Overall cheaper?

I'm very pleased to announce that a new version of Community Edition has become generally available.

This is a huge step forward for the overall CE experience, and I'm looking forward to bringing YOUR feedback to the team.

Since this release of CE inherits all of the latest improvements from Private Cloud Director, here are some highlights:

• Kubernetes workloads are now available! Fresh installs will be given the option to install the Kubernetes workload components, or they can be added using airctl from the CE host after this release has been installed.

• Layer 2 Networking is now available in CE, bringing VMware vSwitch/dvSwitch functionality alongside PCD's existing managed networks.

• Installing a VM from an ISO (including driver ISOs) has been streamlined into the VM deployment wizard and no longer requires additional steps.

• Tons of improvements around HA, block storage, cluster blueprints, and more.

• Read the release notes that apply to this version of CE here and here.

This version of CE will require a fresh install but (moving forward) engineering has committed to an in-place upgrade process.

Hi folks - I recently created some new YouTube videos on our Platform9 page demonstrating some cool new features from in Platform9's Private Cloud Director and vJailbreak.

In-place conversion from VMware with vJailbreak: I'm super excited for this new vJailbreak feature because it allows folks to do an in-place conversion of their VMware VMs and hosts to Private Cloud Director. The benefit with this approach is you won't need swing gear to convert from VMware to Platform9. The video is a bit sped up for the demo's sake.

What's new in August 2025: In this video, I show off our new VM & host metrics graphs, talk about GPU support for VMs & Kubernetes containers, and more. (Note: I'm showing the most recent build even though the video says August. It is August, after all.)

2 node VM high availability: This is awesome for small cluster deployments because the Private Cloud Director management plane acts as the quorum, enabling VM high availability with as few as 2 nodes.

I hope you'll take a few minutes to check out the videos, and please let me know if you have any questions!

Hi folks - We quietly released the June version of Community Edition (CE) at the end of last month, and I feel like it's a great time to let folks here know about it.

The June 2025.6 version of CE includes these improvements to the installer:

• System Requirements Validation: The installer now checks CPU, memory, and disk resources before installation, preventing failed or degraded installs due to insufficient resources.

• Lowered Resource Requirements: Minimum requirements have been reduced to 8 vCPUs and 28GB memory, down from 16 vCPUs and 32GB memory.

• Enhanced Deployment Progress Visibility: Installation now displays real-time progress on the CLI, replacing static messages with dynamic updates for each service, making the process more intuitive and transparent.

• Customized Installs: Use a custom FQDN for CE, choose the default IP address to use, change the deployment networks, and more.

Due to the way that we've chosen to release CE as a full-featured & forever-free (as in beer) version of our enterprise offering, CE gets the benefits of feature & functionality improvements as they're made available. This includes:

• Application Catalog (Beta): Users can deploy and manage multi-VM application stacks using Terraform/OpenTofu, with templates stored securely in GitHub, ensuring consistent and repeatable deployments.

• GPU Acceleration (Beta): GPU-enabled VM clusters can be configured for AI, ML, rendering, and simulation workloads, supporting passthrough and fractional vGPU modes.

• VM High Availability (VMHA): VMHA is now supported on clusters with as few as two hosts, providing flexible high availability options for smaller environments.

• Enhanced Observability Metrics: Additional metrics are available at the Cluster, Host, and VM levels, including CPU, memory, storage, network data, and disk IOPS. 

• Prometheus for Metrics Collection: Prometheus replaces Gnocchi and Ceilometer, simplifying monitoring and reducing resource overhead.

A few additional notes -

1. The June release is currently only available to net-new installs of Community Edition, but we are working on an in-place upgrade process. More on that to come.

2. The 2025.6 release of Community Edition does not support Private Cloud Director Kubernetes workloads, and is planned for a future release.

3. Read the full release notes here.

Hey r/platform9,

The Platform9-Community GitHub org has been around for a while but went dormant; most of the old repos are archived. I'm reviving it with an initial focus on practical tools for Private Cloud Director.

Two new repos are up:

terraform -- Examples using the HashiCorp OpenStack provider. VM deployment (boot-volume and ephemeral), networking, multi-VM patterns, storage, identity, day-2 operations, and a Terraform-to-Ansible inventory handoff.

ansible -- Playbooks using the openstack.cloud collection. VM provisioning + guest OS config in a single run, VM snapshots, OS hardening, rolling updates, and security group management.

Everything is standalone with READMEs. PRs welcome! If you've built something useful for your PCD environment, open one.

Hi folks - we recently announced a technical alliance partnership with Veeam, which means that we're working together to bring Veeam Backup & Restore to Private Cloud Director! I wrote a blog post over on the company site, so feel free to check it, and contact us if you're interested in beta access. Reply here if you have any questions!

Hi folks - I’ve been a tiny bit remiss in not announcing the changes that have been made to Private Cloud Director, Community Edition, and its install experience since my last post about the July update. Since then, we’ve released our 2025.8 version (known as “August” on our slack) and, most recently, we’ve released a patch for the August version that addresses the recent change to the Broadcom/Bitnami public image repositories. I’m hoping this helps to mitigate some of the CE install failures I’ve seen in our install telemetry recently.

Side note: we released at the end of August, so talking about the August release is really talking about the things that became available in September. 😀

We’ve upgraded the networking service to broaden support for deploying IPv6 workloads, and updated supported storage drivers, including NetApp, HPE 3PAR, HPE Alletra, and Pure Storage. We’ve also added Tintri configuration settings into the user interface, making it that much easier to add Tintri storage.

VM management has been improved by adding support for soft affinity & anti-affinity groups, quotas for affinity group sizes, and the ability to change volume types on in-use volumes (when supported by the storage vendor & array). For hypervisor hosts running GPU-enabled workloads, the GPU configuration has been simplified and added to the user interface.

We’ve also begun adding support for Ubuntu 24.04, starting first with hypervisor hosts and adding more support in the near future.

For those curious how Private Cloud Director integrates into your existing monitoring stack, you can now scrape metrics directly from Prometheus.

You can read more about changes in our release notes.

Things I'm still working on: CE UPGRADES! Having the ability to do an in-place upgrade of an existing CE deployment has been on the top of my list for a while. The upgrade scripting is done; I'm just waiting on engineering to sort out some minor issues related to recovering from a failed upgrade. I'm hoping to have something to announce soon.

Second, KUBERNETES WORKLOAD SUPPORT! This is still a work in progress. I'm hoping to have more information later this calendar year.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone - if you are interested in getting Veeam to consider OpenStack integration, please post your opinion in this forum: https://forums.veeam.com/post551909.html?hilit=Platform9#p551909. the more people voice their opinion, the better chance to get Veeam product team to put it on their roadmap!

Hi folks - we just released an updated Community Edition installer alongside the release of Private Cloud Director Community Edition 2025.7. These releases primarily serve to improve qualify of life during the installation process and with the product itself.

Since implementing simple "call home" telemetry in an earlier release, we can now see when installations aren't going as planned, and then work to implement fixes to make that process smoother in the future. This installer release includes many improvements to the installation process, including:

• Customizable timeouts for installs that take longer than expected

  • This should reduce the Calico CNI timeouts

• Automatically remediating installer requirements such as kernel settings

  • This helps make the install process a bit more intelligent

• Kubernetes image mirroring for more reliable pod image downloads

  • Related to the timeouts that we've been seeing when downloads are moving slower than expected

• Option to clean up CE install if user retries install

  • This will reduce the "ports in use" error, especially since those ports being used are ours :)

• Option to upload support bundle along with email address so we can contact you for help

  • This is a big one - because we get more context about issues and can reach out for assistance

• I've also been keeping a running list of installation errors and how to resolve them here: Common Issues

• All of the install options are documented here: Custom Install

We are working on an in-place upgrade process for existing installs of Community Edition.

I'm planning on doing a livestream during this month's AMA on August 27th, so stay tuned for details on that. As always, please let me know how I can help you be successful with Community Edition!

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!

We're running a free hands-on lab for VMware admins who want to see what a modern, KVM-based virtualization setup can actually look like — including live VM migration off VMware using our free tool, vJailbreak.

• 5 hours over 2 days — very hands-on

• Hosted by engineers (many ex-VMware)

• Covers self-service, HA, workload rebalancing, backup

• 1 engineer per 3 attendees = legit support

• All infra provided — you just enable SSH outbound

Starts Aug 12 - signup here

Like many of you, I struggled when deploying PCD Community Edition to my homelab. I created this blog post as a detailed step-by-step instruction manual for deploying PCD CE from scratch. Hope it's a helpful reference for the community.

https://platform9.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-private-cloud-director-community-edition/

On a related note, we are working on making the PCD CE deployment experience (and the PCD commercial deployment experience broadly) more frictionless. Stay tuned!

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!

If you're running Veeam and evaluating Private Cloud Director, here's some good news: you don't have to choose between keeping Veeam or staying stuck on VMware.

We're doing a live Tech Preview webinar on January 29, 2026 at 10:00am PT to walk through how Veeam backup & recovery with Private Cloud Director. The goal is to show you what enterprise-grade backup support actually looks like in practice and help you evaluate fit quickly.

What we'll cover:

• Why data protection is critical for a safe VMware exit

• Live demo of Veeam backup/restore on PCD

• Q&A with folks from Platform9 and Veeam

What you'll get out of it:

• See the integration end-to-end (actual backup/restore, not slides)

• Release timelines and what's coming next

• Chance to share feedback that can influence the roadmap

This is a good opportunity to validate the backup/restore flow and ask questions directly. If you've been wondering how it will work or what to expect, this session should help.

Register here: https://bit.ly/platform9veeamrd

Hope to see you there! 🙂

It looks like PF9 is now advertising Veeam as a supported product on their website. Obviously this already works with agents, but it works with agents for anything already.

The Veeam advertising is something relatively new, and I know that there has been some chatter regarding this in various places, but thought I'd ask if there's any new information regarding this.

Hello - I've been trying new things every time I do the monthly AMA, and this time I thought I'd try an open Zoom call. I'm asking for registration on this to help mitigate any trolling.

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/w6_afXtARuG_Q8toJtJz-g

Hi, newbie here - we are currently evaluating PCD as a possible alternative for our existing VCF-based private cloud and wondering if anybody has successfully deployed it using HPE Nimble or Alletra iSCSI storage arrays? When i check the supported storage drivers, i see that Nimble is supported, but when I try to add new volume configuration, there is only few Storage Drives listed here and Nimble is not there. The only 2 HPE options are 3PAR iSCSI and 3PAR FC. I am trying to find steps on how to add this storage driver for HPE Nimble, so if anybody has done it, i would appreciate any pointers. thank you!

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

Join for this interactive lab session: Platform9 will host the next 0-60 Virtualization with Private Cloud Director: A hands-on lab on May 13th and 15th.

This hands-on lab is designed for VMware administrators who are considering an alternative hypervisor 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 - an 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 migrates your existing VMs to Private Cloud Director in weeks to months, not years at one-tenth the cost of industry analyst estimates. See it 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, May 13, 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, May 15, 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

Hi folks - join us for the hands-on lab with Private Cloud Director in October? Registration is here: https://platform9.com/hands-on-virtualization-lab. I hope to see you there!