Community Edition

Understand what Community Edition is, how it’s different, and where to start.

Community Edition is not for production workloads. Use it for labs, evaluation, and learning only.

New release!

For details on the latest release of Private Cloud Director Community Edition, see the Release Notes.

Community Edition At a Glance

Community Edition (CE) is the community-supported, free, full-featured version of Private Cloud Director.

You get the same core virtualization experience as the commercial product.

CE is different in how it’s deployed and supported:

• Single-host control plane. CE runs the management plane on one machine.

• You bring the hypervisors. Workloads always run on separate hypervisor hosts.

• Community support. Use https://www.reddit.com/r/platform9/ and the docs.

If you want a Platform9-managed control plane, use SaaS Hosted. If you need a customer-managed highly available control plane, use Self Hosted.

See Getting Started for a quick comparison.

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How Community Edition Works

CE is two system types working together:

• CE host (control plane)

• Hypervisor hosts (run VMs)

Community Edition Host (Control Plane)

The CE host is where you manage the platform.

It:

• Serves the web UI

• Exposes REST APIs

• Monitors hosts and VMs

• Orchestrates lifecycle operations (create, resize, migrate, HA, and more)

• Hosts Grafana dashboards

It does not run your VMs.

Hypervisor Hosts (Compute)

Hypervisor hosts run the virtual machines.

Each hypervisor runs a Platform9 host agent. The agent:

• Connects the host to the CE control plane

• Executes lifecycle actions

• Sends health and metrics back to CE

Shared Storage (Optional, But Recommended)

Shared storage (NFS, iSCSI, and other supported backends) enables:

• Persistent volumes for VM disks

• Live migration between hypervisors

• VM High Availability (VM HA) that can restart VMs on another host

If you use only local storage on hypervisors:

• Live migration requires VM shutdown.

• VM disks stay tied to the original host.

• VM HA can’t protect against host loss for those VMs.

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Get Started

1. Validate requirements in Prerequisites.

2. Run the standard install in Install.

3. If you need custom CIDRs, domains, or other changes, read Custom Installation before installing.

4. If anything fails, use Common Issues.

Want a walkthrough instead of reference docs? Use the tutorial: Beginner's Guide to Deploying PCD Community Edition.

Operations

• Backup strategy and procedures: Backup and Restore CE