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Install

Default installation steps for Community Edition, plus first-login and basic operations.

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

For a guided walkthrough, use Beginner’s Guide to Deploying PCD Community Edition.

Install Community Edition

This installs the Community Edition (CE) control plane on a single CE host. You then onboard one or more hypervisor hosts to run VMs.

Read Prerequisites first. See Custom Installation if you need custom CIDRs or domains.

Outcome

After install, you can:

  • Log in to the web UI

  • Onboard hypervisor hosts

  • Create networks, images, and VMs

  • View metrics in the web UI or Grafana

Timeline

Typical runtime is ~45 minutes. Slow systems or slow registries can push it to ~90 minutes.

  • 5–10 min: system prep and prerequisite checks

  • 10–15 min: K3s cluster creation

  • 20–30 min: PCD services deployment to the K3s cluster

  • ~5 min: verification and credential output

Deploy the CE host

Run the installer on the CE host as a user with sudo access.

By default in Ubuntu, all users in the sudo group have the ability to sudo. Group membership can be validated with the command groups <username> and sudo permissions can be verified with sudo -l -U <username> .

The installer will:

  • Ask you to accept the Community Edition EULA

  • Ask whether to enable the Kubernetes management plane (optional - see Kubernetes management plane prompt)

  • Run prerequisite checks

  • Deploy the CE management plane

  • Print the user interface web address and provide admin credentials

If prerequisite checks fail, see Common Issues. If installation fails, the installer can optionally upload a support bundle.

Kubernetes management plane prompt

The installer asks whether to enable the Kubernetes management plane, which lets you provision managed Kubernetes clusters. This is opt-in; the default is No.

Enabling it:

  • Adds approximately 10 minutes to install time

  • Requires a larger CE host - 12 CPUs and 32 GB RAM minimum (see Prerequisites)

To skip the prompt for automation, pre-export the variable before running the installer:

Installation example

Enable Kubernetes management plane on an existing CE installation

To enable the Kubernetes management plane on an existing CE deployment:

The base CE installation must be fully deployed and healthy before running this command.

This takes approximately 10 minutes.

To verify the installation succeeded:

All pods should show Running.

The CE host must meet the minimum requirements for the Kubernetes management plane: 12 CPUs and 32 GB RAM. See Prerequisites.

Access the web UI

For default installations, the web user interface can be accessed at https://pcd.pf9.io. That name must resolve from your browser.

If you've customized the Community Edition FQDN, then replace pcd.pf9.io with that value.

Option 1: Local hosts file (single machine)

Use this for quick testing, as only your computer will be able to resolve the URL to the user interface.

Linux/MacOS

Windows

  1. Open Notepad as Administrator. From the Windows Start menu, right-click the Notepad icon and choose "Run as Administrator".

  2. Open C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

  3. Add the following, but be sure to replace the example IP. Save and close the file afterwards.

Option 2: Real DNS (team access)

Create A records in your DNS server:

Log in

Open the user interface URL in a browser (the default is pcd.pf9.io). Accept the self-signed certificate on first visit.

  • Select Use local credentials.

  • Use the admin@airctl.localnet credentials printed by the installer.

  • Keep Domain as default.

  • Do not check "I have an MFA token".

SSO & MFA are unavailable until configured. Errors with an SSO or MFA login attempt will fail until they are configured.

Private Cloud Director Community Edition local credentials login screen
Private Cloud Director Community Edition local credentials login screen

Admin credentials and Grafana access

Do not rename the default admin user, admin@airctl.localnet. Do not change its password.

This account is used internally by Private Cloud Director services.

Create separate users for administrator or self-service access.

The default admin account is also used for Grafana authentication. Changing the default admin email or password can break Grafana access.

Next steps

  1. See the Getting Started guide at Step 2 - Create Cluster Blueprint & Virtualized Cluster

  2. Follow the rest of the Getting Started guide to onboard hypervisor hosts, create networks, upload images, and create virtual machines.

Operations and troubleshooting

Validate the installation

Your deployment is healthy if the region is marked as Ready. Ready services should match desired services.

Example output:

Retrieve admin credentials
Logs and service names

Hypervisor host logs

  • /var/log

  • /var/log/pf9

CE host logs

  • /var/log/pf9/fluentbit/ddu.log (JSON; includes Kubernetes pod logs)

You can also use kubectl logs to fetch pod logs.

Hypervisor host services

Service names start with pf9. Examples:

  • pf9-hostagent

  • pf9-imagelibrary

  • pf9-ostackhost

Grafana credentials

Grafana uses the same admin credentials printed at install time.

  • Username: admin@airctl.localnet

  • Password: retrieve from the CE host:

Default Grafana URL:

  • https://pcd.pf9.io/grafana/login

Reset Grafana admin password (advanced)

Resetting Grafana independently is not recommended. Keep Grafana and UI admin passwords in sync.

The namespace is pcd by default. If you customized the FQDN, use the FQDN shortname for the namespace. Example: If the FQDN is ce.acmeretail.com, assign ce to the NS variable in the below example.

Uninstall Community Edition
Expand an Ubuntu logical volume (LVM)

If your root filesystem is smaller than the physical volume, expand it.

  1. Find the root device:

  1. Resize the LV (example name shown):

  1. Resize the filesystem:

Troubleshooting

Start with Common Issues.

Optional learning resources

Platform9 YouTube:

PreviousPrerequisites
NextCustom Installation

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