Nutanix announces beta of Community Edition software As foreshadowed by The Reg's virtualisation desk, Nutanix has announced a “community edition” of the software it uses to power its hyperconverged servers-and-storage-in-a-box rigs. The software will see the light of day at the company's user conference on June 8th, where it will merge as a “full-featured, limited-scale version …
masquerading as a "community" solution. Really who has 4 bare metal servers in their home lab that meet these requirements? I'd hazard a guess that very few people do, let alone the 10GbE networking to support inter-node comms. This is better suited to a large org that has spare resources available than an actual community member who wanted to try out the bits.
With that said, all of you rushing to sign up, you're going directly into salesforce so get ready for the calls.
"Really who has 4 bare metal servers in their home lab that meet these requirements?"
I do.
Most vExperts do. Pretty much every EMC elect or Cisco Champion does. A goodly chunk of the MVPs. Not folks that will buy Nutanix, but folks who influence companies who might, or who write about it. It's called "thought leadership". Given that John Troyer has been advising Nutnaix on things community related, I wouldn't dismiss the whole "reaching out to thought leaders" thing. Troyer has a proven track record.
This is exactly the right move for Nutanix as it comes under threat from an increasing number of competitors: build a loyal cult following amongst the sorts of people who themselves have decent followings. Of course, the "thought leaders" aren't easy to influence. Everyone is trying to influence them, so they become pretty immune pretty quick. You can only really convince them if they have whatever it is you are trying to sell to hand, and can bash on it.
Nothing succeeds with thought leaders like getting your gear into their labs.
Like it or not, it's how the game is played. More to the point, Nutanix has been building this strategy for some time, after having talked to the best of the best at influencing those who influence the rest. The community edition isn't for the hoi polloi. Hell, it's barely aimed at me, and I have been spending rather a lot of time and money putting together a lab.
It's aimed at the Howard Marks and Steven Fosketts of the world. The Stuart Minimans and the Hans de Leneers. Big names with 10x the influence someone like me has. VCDXes, high participating enterprise admins and top 50 bloggers.
The rest who want to play with the toys will be supported. They will be tolerated, but they are not the key target. Welcome to IT. I hope you enjoy your stay, but it's a hell of a lot more fun if you just let your grip on sanity go and start thinking about social dynamics like M.C. Escher thinks about architecture.
influencer community types can get access to the nutanix POC lab pretty much anytime they want without having to incur the time/effort to spin up a neutered community edition of the product. Your comment has zero merit. This isn't thought leadership, this is list building. Most of the people you mentioned are paid for commentary types, they are not going to waste their time playing around with something that they dont get paid for. As for the various other groups, I'd hazard a guess that they dont have the required HW on hand to build out a nutanix cluster.
there's a good reason that you cant sign up for this trial without a corporate email address, and why they are giving away 3k towards a home lab.
I've done the remote POC. It's not remotely what you portray it as.
First, gettin gyour own workloads on it is difficult, if not impossible. Three isn't much bandwidth available, so unless you've talked them into the better part of a week, you don't get to look at much. Secondly, the chances you'll have access to an identical piece of hardware that you can load up with alternate setups is basically zero.
So not only are you highly limited in what you can test in a Nutanix RPOC, but you can't compare Nutanix like-for-like against their competition on the same hardware. That's what the community edition does for me, and for many of the others I have talked to who are excited to play with it.
The community edition is Nutanix putting it's money where it's mouth is. They say they're faster, stronger, smarter and better. Now we all get to prove it.
As for your erroneous belief that the tech bloggers and analysts of the virtualization and storage community won't be testing this, you don't know them very well. I happen to know that many of these folks are very excited by the Nutanix community edition, some having just recently build out 4 node clusters just so that they could test it, and other hyperconverged solutions as well.
Believe it or not, all of us, from Howard to Stuart, to Hans to myself actually spend most of our time learning. We test all sorts of things because without taking the time to do that our voices have no value and we don't get paid.
You are correct about one thing. There *is* a reason that you have to sign up to the trail with a non-free e-mail address. (It doesn't have to be corporate. Many bloggers have their own domain names and those will be accepted, thank you very much.)
Nutanix is very concerned that whomever downloads and installs this is going to have a bad experience. They want to be able to stay in constant contact with the initial Community Edition user community. They want to make sure that any and all questions are answered and that a positive experience is had by all. What's the point of a community edition if you get bad reviews from frustrated users?
To put this another way: Nutanix doesn't need a stack of corporate e-mail addresses to try to sell to. They have that already. They have unlimited piles of this stuff. Every single event their booth is hopping, to the point that it's usually the busiest booth there. The Citrix event that just went down is a great example: there was a Citrix conference but you'd never know anyone but Nutanix showed up.
I'm not saying Nutanix is perfect - far from it - but I know many of the people involved in this project and have followed its development for well over a year now. The point of the community edition is emphatically not simply lead gen. It's community building.
Marketing/sales may try some lead gen shenanigans at various points. In fact, they'd probably be stupid not to. But that won't last forever. It will come in waves.
Nutanix is trying to differentiate themselves from VMware. One of the ways they're doing that is by opening the kimono a little and making it possible for the community - and ultimately SMBs - to take advantage of/explore Nutanix's technology without the ridiculous cost.
Try THAT with VMware! Unless you happen to be pretty damned influential, good luck getting enough licenses for even 4 nodes out of them! VMware still guards VSAN like a pitbull, even from thought influencers, and have a pile of "you can't review us unless we say so" in their EULAs.
Again, Nutanix isn't hugely better, but they are somewhat better. More to the point, I think the Wheaton's Law brigade is winning internally...at least as regards working with the community.
The big question is...why are you, personally, so upset by the community edition? What about it's existence threatens you so much?
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