Platform9 Adds Free Community Edition of Private Cloud Platform
Platform9 this week at the Kubecon + CloudNative Europe 2025 conference, unfurled a free Community Edition of its Private Cloud Director platform for deploying virtual machines that has no hidden fees or fixed amount of time it is allowed to run.
The free edition, however, is limited to a single region and does not include any commercial support.
Madhura Maskasky, chief product officer for Platform9, said the goal is to make it simpler for IT teams to experiment with a less expensive alternative to VMware for managing private clouds based on virtual machines.
Based on an open source K3s distribution of Kubernetes, Private Cloud Director provides a IT teams managing virtual machines with a familiar set of capabilities and experience, including High Availability, Dynamic Resource Rebalancing, VM Live Migration, Distributed Virtual Switches and Software Defined Networking along with an option to run containers on top of a hypervisor.
Additionally, it can be installed on an existing x86 server configured with as little as 32GB of RAM and 12 CPUs and connects to existing storage systems.
It’s not clear to what degree IT teams are migrating away from VMware but most of them are considering their options when it comes to deploying new applications. The total cost of migrating existing legacy applications to a new platform remains significant. However, organizations that are building either new monolithic or cloud-native applications that need to take advantage of a hypervisor to run in isolation are today more inclined to rely less on VMware in the wake of recent changes made by Broadcom to VMware software policies, noted Maskasky.
At the same time, many organizations are also reconsidering their IT strategies as platform engineering as a methodology for centralizing the management of application environments continues to gain momentum, she added.
Platform9, regardless of the approach to managing IT, is ultimately betting that the frameworks used to manage infrastructure will increasingly be accessed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Many IT teams, if allowed, would prefer not to have to maintain and update themselves the framework they are using to manage a distributed computing environment.
The challenges, as always, are the technical and cultural challenges that will inevitably be encountered when moving to a new platform for managing IT. Many IT administrators today, for example, have been managing VMware environments for multiple decades. As such, there are both hard and soft costs to consider when switching platforms.
However, in the wake of the changes made to VMware licensing policies, more organizations than ever are also now aware of the implications of being locked into a specific platform. As a result, the motivations for shifting to a different platform are now much higher.
No matter what any IT organization ultimately decides, any transition is likely to be more gradual than sudden. After all, the one thing IT teams want to avoid at all costs is any kind of major disruption to the services they provide. Most of them, consequently, will want to take a good, long look at a free edition of any new platform before deciding whether to make any kind of leap.
