Well, I missed an opportunity to talk about Private Cloud Director, Community Edition. Mea culpa. Mea culpa. But the saying is “better late than never”, so here we are.
Last month we released our latest version of Community Edition. It’s 2025.8, known as “August” in our Slack. We released at the end of August, so talking about the August release is really talking about the things that became available in September. Let me take you for a tour of what’s in this release. Remember, everything in Community Edition is part of the enterprise edition, so there’s no FOMO with CE.
But First, a Word from our Sponsor
We’ve been seeing some installation failures recently that we have addressed in a patch, in the current distro, that addresses the recent change to the Broadcom/Bitnami public image repositories. I’m hopeful that we’ll see those issues subside as you install the latest release. Now on to the good stuff…
What’s in the Box
We’ve recently expanded support for networking and storage, allowing you to configure Community Edition to deploy even more real-life workloads, and support the third-party storage vendors you already use. We now include support for deploying IPv6 workloads, letting you deploy cutting-edge workloads with 128-bit addressing, eliminating NAT traversal, offering better logging, improved security, and IoT support.
Private Cloud Director is designed to support your business practices, not force you to change them. That’s why we’ve added support for even more storage vendors, and will continue to expand our storage support. We’ve added enhanced support for NetApp, HPE 3PAR, HPE Alletra, and Pure Storage. We’ve also added Tintri configuration settings into the user interface, making it that much easier to add Tintri storage.
It’s not just the peripherals that got attention. We’ve added new features and functionality to make managing virtual machine workloads more powerful than ever. You can now define soft affinity and anti-affinity rules for your VMs. Instead of rigid policies that can cause scheduling conflicts, soft rules give you flexibility to accommodate a dynamic environment.
And more on the storage story: when supported by your storage vendor and array, you can now change the volume type of an in-use disk without downtime. That means if a workload outgrows its performance tier, or if you need to shift from standard to high-IOPS storage, you don’t have to take the VM offline. Easier for you, less disruption for your users.
And for environments running GPU-accelerated workloads we’ve streamlined GPU configuration directly into the PCD user interface. No more digging through complex configs: admins can now enable and manage GPU resources with just a few clicks, making it easier to unlock high-performance computing for a wider set of users.
More to Come
We’ve also begun adding support for Ubuntu 24.04, starting first with hypervisor hosts and adding more support in the near future.
For those curious how Private Cloud Director integrates into your existing monitoring stack, you can now scrape metrics directly from Prometheus. You can read more about changes in our release notes.
Things I’m still working on: CE UPGRADES! Having the ability to do an in-place upgrade of an existing CE deployment has been on the top of my list for a while. I’m hoping to have something to announce soon.
Also, KUBERNETES WORKLOAD SUPPORT! This is still a work in progress. I’m hoping to have more information later this calendar year.
If you haven’t downloaded it yet, grab the latest release and see what’s new. Keep an eye on our subreddit and the Community Edition web page for the latest updates. We’re always happy to hear from our community and value the community input. Our goal is to make Private Cloud Director and Community Edition the easiest way to manage your private cloud.
