SmartX Releases HCI Kit Community Edition: Free HCI with Community Support

Press Releases

BEIJING, June 30, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — SmartX, a modern IT infrastructure innovator, has released the HCI Kit Community Edition, a free version of its hyperconvergence product SmartX HCI. The Community Edition includes core HCI software SMTX OS and management platform CloudTower. It is freely available, easy-to-deploy, feature-rich, and community-supported, providing easy access to hyperconvergence for worldwide users.

The Community Edition allows users to experience core features of SmartX HCI, including

  • SMTX OS (community edition) that provides compute virtualization, distributed block storage, as well as network & security.
    – ELF: the native hypervisor that optimizes performance and streamlines operations & maintenance.
    – ZBS: the distributed block storage with the reliability and high performance battle-tested in production across financial services and other industries.
    – Everoute: the network and security product that provides micro-segmentation, securing east-west traffic with distributed firewalls for virtual machines.
  • CloudTower (community edition) that provides multi-cluster management, capable of managing clusters across datacenters with one unified platform.

Designed for anyone interested in experiencing HCI, the Community Edition can be installed to learn, evaluate, or use conveniently with zero cost. HCI enthusiasts could get hands-on experience and see how HCI achieves simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency; End users considering HCI products could compare it with other alternatives and run a proof-of-concept test, before making a decision; IT engineers could deploy it for Dev & Test, starting with a small scale.

The installation and deployment of Community Edition are quite simple. It can be deployed on mainstream commercial x86 servers. The whole process takes approximately 2 hours*, users can check the minimum hardware requirements and guidance on the official website.

The Community Edition offers a 30-day free trial, and before it expires, users could apply for a free community perpetual license. SmartX also supports users to switch to Commercial Editions seamlessly to unlock more advanced capabilities.

Additionally, users could join SmartX Community on Slack, to get support from the community experts, and exchange ideas and feedback with professionals in IT infrastructure, distributed systems, and the cloud.

Additional Resources:

SmartX HCI

HCI Kit Community Edition

Installation and Deployment Guide

SMTX OS Spec

CloudTower Spec

Notes:

* 2-hour is an estimation and subject to change in actual installation & deployment.