Platform9 announced the general availability of its Private Cloud Director Community Edition, a free, community-supported version of its private cloud platform for single-region deployments. Designed for virtualization practitioners, the Community Edition offers the full Private Cloud Director experience with no hidden fees or time limits.

“Private Cloud Director Community Edition gives virtualization practitioners a way to test drive the easiest private cloud experience in the industry, at their own pace. We can’t wait to see what they build with Community Edition,” said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Platform9.

The Community Edition provides enterprise-grade features such as VM High Availability, Dynamic Resource Rebalancing, VM Live Migration, Distributed Virtual Switches, and Software Defined Networking. It can be installed on existing x86 server hardware or a VM with as little as 32GB of RAM and 12 CPUs, and it connects to existing storage and infrastructure.

Ideal for small-scale deployments such as homelabs, test/dev environments, and proof-of-concept labs, the Community Edition offers a lightweight, single-node installation powered by open source k3s. Users can install it on a single Ubuntu machine for evaluation or experimentation.

While the Community Edition is intended for non-production use, Platform9 encourages production users to upgrade to the enterprise version of Private Cloud Director, which includes 24×7 customer support.