Software

The customer must have a valid account on the Next Community Edition forum (https://www.nutanix.com/products/register) to download the software, access most support resources, and activate the cluster.

The email account used to set up the account must be a business address. Public accounts like Gmail and Yahoo cannot be used.

4.1 Licensing

Ask your customer to sign up for a Next Community Edition account and register for software access by visiting the following link:

https://www.nutanix.com/products/register.

4.2 Obtaining the Software

After registration, download the software from the Next forum post entitled “Nutanix Next Community Download Software” located here: https://next.nutanix.com/discussion-forum-14. The customer must be logged in to access this location (Nutanix, Inc., 2020).

4.3 Preparing the Boot Device

The boot device (USB stick or SATA DOM) must be at least 8 GB as mentioned previously. Flashing the boot device with Nutanix software will destroy all pre-existing data on that drive.

You will need one boot device for each cluster node.

Windows

You will need to use a third-party tool such as the open source Win32DiskImager to image your boot device(s) with the Nutanix ISO downloaded in Section 4.2.

Linux/Mac OS X

The following procedure was taken verbatim from Nutanix’s help article “Getting Started with Nutanix Community Edition:”

If you are using a Linux or Mac OS X environment, you can use the dd command to image the device:

dd if=ce.img of=/dev/sdX

where X is the USB drive letter.

• [Linux only] To find the USB drive letter, check the output of this command:

for i in /dev/sd?; do udevadm info --query=all --name=$i; done

• (OS X only) List any storage devices:

diskutil list

• (OS X only) Show information about a specific device:

diskutil info /dev/X

where X is the USB drive.

(OS X only) For improved performance when imaging, specify a block size of 1 MB.

For example:

dd if=ce.img of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m

(Nutanix, Inc., 2020)

Never remove a USB boot volume while the node is powered on!