Beginner’s Guide to Deploying PCD Community Edition

Hey everyone! 👋 So, you're curious about setting up your own little cloud haven? I've got you covered with this simple guide to getting started with Private Cloud Director Community Edition (CE). Think of it as your friendly "let's build something cool together" walkthrough.

What's Community Edition?

This version of Private Cloud Director is awesome for testing stuff out or if you're just starting small. You can deploy it on a bare-metal setup or inside a virtual machine. The infrastructure and workload regions run on the same VM, but a separate hypervisor host is needed. This can run as a VM alongside CE if needed. This guide will use a single bare-metal host to run the necessary VMs. Check out the official docs to learn more about Private Cloud Director Community Edition.

My Home Lab Setup

Since I'm a bit of a hardware geek (I build water-cooled gaming PCs in my spare time!), that's what we're using for our example. Here's the beast:

  • Intel i9 12900k (16 cores, 24 threads)
  • 64 GB RAM
  • 2 TB SSD
  • Nvidia 3090 Ti

But hey, feel free to use whatever you've got lying around. The minimum hardware requirements for a CE host are:

  • 8 CPUs
  • 32GB RAM
  • 100GB local storage

In order to create virtual machines, at least one hypervisor host must be available. The minimum hardware requirements for a hypervisor host are:

  • 8 CPUs
  • 16GB RAM suggested
  • 100GB local storage suggested

Let's Get Down to Business: Deployment Steps

Okay, here's the rundown of what we're going to do:

1. Bare-Metal Hypervisor Install: First, we'll install Ubuntu Desktop on our machine (highlighted in red in the diagram below). This will allow us to use the KVM hypervisor to spin up virtual machines that we will use to deploy Community Edition and our hypervisor host into.

2. Private Cloud Director Community Edition Install: We will then install Community Edition into the VM highlighted in red.

3. Hypervisor Host Onboarding: Finally, we will onboard a hypervisor host that will host the workload virtual machines on it. And yes, we will take full advantage of nested virtualization to make this happen.

This is what everything will look like once we’re done. We will be onboarding a single hypervisor host, but feel free to onboard more (shown in dotted line below) if you have the resources available.

Let’s get started!

Bare-Metal Hypervisor Install

Install Ubuntu Desktop on the bare metal host. We will use virt-manager GUI to easily manage our virtual machines. Launch virt-manager GUI with the following command.

Bash
Copy

Next, we will create an Ubuntu Server 22.04 virtual machine to host Private Cloud Director CE. Navigate to File > New Virtual Machine.

Follow the prompts to create the virtual machine. Ensure that the following resources are assigned to the virtual machine:

  • 8 vCPU
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 100 GB local storage
  • The network configuration that we updated above

Launch the VM, and follow the prompts to install Ubuntu Server.

Follow the prompts till you reach the Guided storage configuration screen. For simplicity, uncheck LVM under the storage configuration menu

If you choose to enable LVM, ensure that the logical volume is expanded to take up the entire physical partition after installation is complete. Installing CE on a volume with less than 50 GB of space will result in failure, even if the underlying partition is larger.

Below are helpful commands to resize the logical volume.

Command to expand LVM to take up the entire partition:

Bash
Copy

Example:

Bash
Copy

Command to resize filesystem to match the logical volume:

Bash
Copy

Example:

Bash
Copy

Private Cloud Director Community Edition Install

Now we are ready to deploy Private Cloud Director CE to the virtual machine. Launch the VM that we just created. Run the commands below to switch to root and begin the deployment process.

Bash
Copy

The final deployment step is long-running and takes around 45 minutes to complete.

Bash
Copy

Once you get to this point, you can monitor the deployment progress by opening another SSH session with the VM.

Bash
Copy

As long as you don’t see any failures here, it means that the installation is progressing without any hiccups.

Bash
Copy

If you accidentally leave the screen above before copying the login credentials, you can view the credentials again by running the following command: airctl get-creds --config /opt/pf9/airctl/conf/airctl-config.yaml

Once the deployment completes, you will be presented with the Private Cloud Director FQDN and login credentials.

Next, we will add DNS entries to our Ubuntu Desktop environment so we can access the Private Cloud Director UI from here. Replace 172.16.122.183 with the IP address of the VM that we just deployed PCD into. This entry allows the DNS to direct requests to the correct IP address when attempting to reach pcd-community.pf9.io or pcd.pf9.io.

Bash
Copy

From the Ubuntu Desktop environment, navigate to pcd-community.pf9.io in a web browser. If everything has gone well, you will see the Private Cloud Director login screen.

Leave the Domain as default, choose "Use local credentials" at the top right, and login with the credentials provided when the Community Edition install completed.

Hypervisor Host Onboarding

Now we will create a new VM that will serve as our hypervisor host to our workload VMs. Similar to how we created the CE VM, create another Ubuntu Server VM with the following resources:

  • 8 CPUs
  • 16GB RAM
  • 100GB local storage

Back in the UI, navigate to Infrastructure > Cluster Blueprint. Fill out the required fields as shown below and hit Save Blueprint.

The Network Interface refers to the name of the Ethernet network interface on the hypervisor host. You can view the network interfaces on your hypervisor host by running the following command.

Bash
Copy

Now we will onboard the new hypervisor host onto PCD. Navigate to Infrastructure > Cluster Hosts > Add New Hosts button on the top right.

Before running the steps displayed, connect to the hypervisor host VM that we just created and add DNS entries like we previously did for our Ubuntu Desktop environment.

Proceed to execute commands from the UI in your hypervisor host VM to onboard this host to PCD.

Bash
Copy

For the second command, skip prompts for Proxy URL and MFA Token by hitting enter. Enter Account URL, Username, Region, and Tenant as shown on the UI. Enter your password when prompted.

Bash
Copy

Finally run the third command.

Bash
Copy

Once the host provisioning process completes, you will see the host in the UI under Infrastructure > Cluster Hosts.

Creating a Virtual Machine with Persistent Storage

We will now create persistent storage that can be used by VMs. We will create a Network File System (NFS) share in the Ubuntu Desktop environment that will be made available to PCD VMs.

Install dependencies with the following command:

Bash
Copy

Create the directory to be shared and update permissions.

Bash
Copy

Update config file with NFS share configuration.

Bash
Copy

Update the contents of the file to the following.

Bash
Copy

The asterisk allows connections from any IP address. This isn’t ideal for any real-world scenarios, but we do this here for the sake of simplicity. rw allows read-write access.

Restart the NFS server and check status.

Bash
Copy

We are now ready to connect to this NFS path from Private Cloud Director. Navigate to Infrastructure > Cluster Blueprint. Under Storage Volume Types, type in a name for the Volume Type and click Add Configuration.

Name your volume configuration, select NFS as the Storage Driver, and use the following as the nfs_mount_point. Replace 192.168.1.206 with the IP address of your Ubuntu Desktop that we used to create the NFS share.

Bash
Copy

Finally, navigate to Infrastructure > Cluster Hosts, select the host we onboarded a few steps ago, and click Edit Roles. Assign the Hypervisor role to the host by checking the box in the Hypervisor column. Under persistent storage select the NFS configuration we created. Click Update Role Assignment.

It’s time to spin up a VM on our hypervisor host. First, we upload an image that will be used to create the VM. I am using CirrOS for its small footprint. Navigate to Images > Images and click on the Add Image button in the top right. Select the CirrOS image, make the selections as shown below, and click Add Image.

Next, create a virtual network that we will attach to our VM. Navigate to Networks and Security > Virtual Networks and click on Create Network button on the top right. Configure the virtual network as follows.

Finally, navigate to Virtual Machines > Virtual Machines and click the Deploy New VM button in the top right corner. Since we want to create this VM with persistent storage, make selections as shown below to use NFS.

You should now see the VM in your Virtual Machines tab.

Select the VM and click on the Console button to launch into the VM.

Congratulations on making it to the end! We started with a bare metal Ubuntu installation and deployed a VM in an enterprise-grade workload management solution. Please give Private Cloud Director Community Edition a spin and let us know how things go.

Head over to our subreddit and join the community!

Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard
  Last updated on Sep 11, 2025
Next to read:
Add Multiple Dual Stack Ports to a VM
On This Page
Beginner’s Guide to Deploying PCD Community EditionWhat's Community Edition?My Home Lab SetupLet's Get Down to Business: Deployment StepsBare-Metal Hypervisor InstallPrivate Cloud Director Community Edition InstallHypervisor Host OnboardingCreating a Virtual Machine with Persistent Storage