Software
The customer must have a valid account on the Next Community Edition forum 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.
Licensing
Ask your customer to sign up for a Next Community Edition account and register for software access by visiting this link.
Obtaining the Software
After registration, download the software from the Next forum post entitled “Nutanix Next Community Download Software”. The customer must be logged in to access this location (Nutanix, Inc., 2020).
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 earlier.
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)