Private Cloud Director: Community Edition

The following instructions apply to installing Community Edition using defaults. Should you wish to customize the installation behavior, please see Custom Installation before installing Community Edition.

For a beginner-friendly guide to getting started with Private Cloud Director Community Edition, check out the Tutorials section: Beginner’s Guide to Deploying PCD Community Edition

For details on the latest release of Private Cloud Director Community Edition, see the Release Notes.

What Is Community Edition?

Private Cloud Director Community Edition is a free, community-supported, and full-featured version of Private Cloud Director. It's free forever and comes with Platform9 community support, currently available on Reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/platform9/.

Community Edition delivers the same core functionality as our commercial version of Private Cloud Director, with the only differences being deployment models:

  1. SaaS-Managed: In this model, the infrastructure region of Private Cloud Director is managed by Platform9, while the workload region is managed by the customer. This approach simplifies infrastructure management for customers, allowing them to focus on their workloads.
  2. Self-Hosted: Both the infrastructure and workload regions are managed by the customer. The infrastructure region requires multiple servers to ensure high availability, making it suitable for organizations with robust IT resources and expertise.
  3. Community Edition: Designed for simplicity, Community Edition installs both the infrastructure and workload regions on a single server. It supports being deployed on either bare-metal or as a virtual machine, offering an accessible option for smaller-scale or experimental use cases.

Note: The 2025.7 release of Community Edition does not support Private Cloud Director Kubernetes workloads, and is planned for a future release.

Prerequisites

The Community Edition host and hypervisor hosts can be any combination of bare-metal or virtual machines. Community Edition has been tested with the Ubuntu 22.04 AMD64 cloud image. A full server distribution is not required, and a minimal distribution is not supported.

Hypervisor hosts deployed as virtual machines must have virtualization support available inside the VM. Virtual machines on ARM CPUs are currently untested.

If you want to verify that nested virtualization is working in a VM, you can check for virtualization support inside the VM by running the below command. If you receive output showing vmx or svm flags, then it is enabled. If you don't, then please see your virtualization provider's documentation on enabling nested virtualization.

Bash
Copy

Community Edition host's requirements:

  • Minimum of Ubuntu 22.04 AMD64 server cloud image

    • Note: Ubuntu 22.04 minimal cloud image may cause installation failures due to missing packages
    • Community Edition will install on Ubuntu 24.04 AMD64 server cloud image, but will not install on any other Linux distribution

  • 8 CPU minimum

    • Intel Nehalem, AMD Bulldozer chip families or newer

  • 28GB RAM minimum

  • 100GB local storage required

  • IPv6 enabled

  • Local ports available: 443, 2379, 2380, 3306, 4194, 5395, 5672, 5673, 6264, 8023, 8158, 8285, 8558, 9080, 10250, 10255

  • Outbound destination ports: TCP - 53, 443; UDP: 53, 123

  • Swap must be disabled. See "Swap enabled" on Resolving failed prerequisites checks for information on how to disable swap and prevent it from being enabled on reboot.

  • See Common Issues for more details on configuring prerequisites

In order to create virtual machines, at least one hypervisor host must be available. Hypervisors will be authorized to run virtual machines managed by Community Edition.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 AMD64 server cloud image required

    • Note: Ubuntu 22.04 minimal cloud image may cause installation failures due to missing packages
    • The hypervisor host prerequisites check requires Ubuntu 22.04, any other Linux or Ubuntu release will not pass the check

  • 8 CPUs and 16GB RAM minimum

  • 100GB local storage minimum

In order to create virtual machines with persistent volumes, backend storage such as NFS must be available. The amount of storage necessary depends on the number and size of persistent volumes. Ephemeral VMs are stored locally on the hypervisor host.

Deploy Community Edition host

Please see Custom Installation for information on customizing your Community Edition installation before installing.

Private Cloud Director Community Edition (CE) can be deployed by any Ubuntu user account that has the ability to sudo. By default in Ubuntu, all users in the sudo group have the ability to sudo. Group membership can be validated with the command groups <username> and sudo permissions can be verified with sudo -l -U <username> .

The CE install can be started with the following command:

Bash
Copy

The install script will prompt for your agreement with the Community Edition EULA. Accept with Y and the install will continue. Should you choose to not agree by pressing N the installation will abort.

The install script will run a prerequisites check before proceeding with the installation. Should the prerequisites check fail, see Common Issues for instructions on resolutions. After the check completes successfully, the install script will show its progress, and when completed it will present the fully qualified domain name of the workload region and administrator credentials.

You will also be prompted to provide feedback on the installation process using a simply voting mechanism.

Should the installation fail, you will be prompted with an option to upload a support bundle to Platform9's S3 bucket, and an option to include your email so we may follow-up and resolve. Both of these are entirely optional and are meant to help improve the user experience with Community Edition.

Installation example
Copy

Local DNS Entries

If DNS is not available, add a DNS entry for the fully qualified domain names of the infrastructure (default: pcd.pf9.io) & workload regions (default: pcd-community.pf9.io) on a local machine, which will allow access to the Community Edition user interface using the workload region domain name. If these values were customized during installation, use the custom values instead.

Linux/Apple
Windows

For Linux or Apple machines, use the following commands to add the DNS entries.

Bash
Copy

Example using the installation defaults.

Example
Copy
Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard

Log In To The User Interface

Navigate to the UI FQDN (the default is pcd-community.pf9.io) in a web browser from the same machine with the manual DNS entries. Community Edition uses self-signed certificates, which will need to be accepted when logging in for the first time.

Keep default as the Domain, choose "Use local credentials" at the top right, and login with the credentials provided when the Community Edition install completed. Note: SSO login isn't available until it has been configured post-installation. If you receive a 404 error while attempting an SSO login before it is configured, that is expected behavior.

At this point, you are ready to start using Private Cloud Director.

Private Cloud Director Community Edition local credentials login screen

Private Cloud Director Community Edition local credentials login screen

Changing Administrator Email & Password

It is not recommended to change the administrator email & unique password that is provided at the end of the Community Edition install, as these are used internally between the infrastructure & workload regions. Instead, please create a new user with administrator access.

Create Cluster Blueprint & Onboard Hypervisors

After Private Cloud Director Community Edition is installed, the next steps are to create a cluster blueprint, create a new cluster, and then begin onboarding hypervisors to that cluster.

  1. Follow Cluster Blueprint article for more information on what cluster blueprints are and how to create one.
  2. Create new cluster using Infrastructure > Clusters.

Once the cluster blueprint and first cluster are created, onboard hypervisor hosts to the cluster and assign roles to them based on the blueprint you setup above.

  1. Follow Add a Host (Self-Hosted & Community Edition Deployment)

After a host is onboarded, create at least one Virtual Network or Physical Network for virtual machine connectivity.

Create Virtual Machines

Read Virtual Machine for steps to provision the first virtual machine on your cluster.

YouTube Playlist

Check out Platform9's YouTube channel for a Private Cloud Director playlist.

Grafana username & password

Depending on the version of Community Edition installed, the default administrator username and password are one of the following two options:

  • username: admin | password: admin
  • username: admin@airctl.localnet | Password can be retrieved from the Community Edition host with the following command:
Bash
Copy

By default, Grafana is available at https://pcd-community.pf9.io/grafana/login.

Reset Grafana administrator password

The Grafana administrator password can be reset using the Community Edition host's command line.

In the below example, pcd-community is the default name for the workload region namespace. If you've modified the FQDN or region name with a custom install, use the appropriate namespace.

Bash
Copy

Log file locations & service names

Community Edition log files

Log files for hypervisor hosts can be found in the /var/log & /var/log/pf9 directories.

Logs for Community Edition can be found at /var/log/pf9/fluentbit/ddu.log This file is structured as JSON and contains all Kubernetes pod logs. Logs from specific Kubernetes pods can be retrieved using the kubectl logs command.

Hypervisor host services

Platform9 hypervisor host service names begin with pf9 .

Examples:

  • pf9-hostagent
  • pf9-imagelibrary
  • pf9-ostackhost

Reinstall or uninstall Community Edition

Private Cloud Director Community Edition & Kubernetes can be fully uninstalled with the following command:

Bash
Copy

Retrieve administrator credentials

Should you need to retrieve the administrator credentials, run the following command on the CE host.

Bash
Copy

Validating an installation

You may validate an installation of Community Edition using the following command. Your deployment is healthy if both deployment details show a Ready task state and the number of ready services matches the number of desired services. This same output is presented immediately after a successful CE installation.

Bash
Copy

An example of a healthy installation:

Bash
Copy

Expanding a Ubuntu logical volume

If you are using LVM (logical volume management) and find that the logical volume size is smaller than the physical volume size, you can expand the logical volume to the size of the physical volume.

First, find the name of the filesystem path that the root of the filesystem (/)is mapped to with df -h. Then use the following example and run the commands using the correct path in your installation.

Example: If the logical volume is named ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv, first resize the logical volume:

sudo lvresize -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

And then, resize the filesystem to match the logical volume:

sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv

Troubleshooting

See Common Issues for troubleshooting or resolving issues.

Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard
Type to search, ESC to discard
  Last updated on Aug 15, 2025
Next to read:
Custom Installation
On This Page
Private Cloud Director: Community EditionWhat Is Community Edition?PrerequisitesDeploy Community Edition hostLocal DNS EntriesLog In To The User InterfaceChanging Administrator Email & PasswordCreate Cluster Blueprint & Onboard HypervisorsCreate Virtual MachinesYouTube PlaylistGrafana username & passwordReset Grafana administrator passwordLog file locations & service namesReinstall or uninstall Community EditionRetrieve administrator credentialsValidating an installationExpanding a Ubuntu logical volumeTroubleshooting