Nutanix has released a first tech preview of the upcoming AOS 5.0 (aka Asterix) release. The bits can be downloaded on the Nutanix Community Edition forum. To download the install or upgrade images you need to be a registered member.
According to John Kohler there will be over 60 major new features, 200 sub-features, and over 2900 misc commits, bug fixes and minor improvements. Not all of these apply to CE, as there will be new stuff for the ESX, Hyper-V, and now XenServer customers. Yes Nutanix and Citrix have announced there will be the choice of XenServer on Nutanix in the future.
I decided to give it a try on my four node CE LAB cluster which is built on Intel NUCs. Be aware that this is really a tech preview. There is no guarantee you will be able to upgrade to RC or GA release, there may be bugs of course and this early release is not feature complete yet.
First you need either the bare metal installer if you want to start from scratch or you have to download the upgrade binary which allows you to upgrade from the September release of the Community Edition. I did the upgrade because I was too lazy to recreate new USB boot media and go to the server room to start over. I prefer the one-click upgrade executed inside a Citrix session on my ChromeBook from the sofa at home…
For the one-click upgrade you need to download a second file, the Metadata JSON file, which also can be downloaded from the mentioned blog post.
After uploading the necessary files you are ready to start the one-click upgrade.
After the upgrade completed on my cluster, there was one issue… i was not able to access my VMs in PRISM anymore: “Exception while retrieving entities”! Oops, I already mentally prepared to start over from scratch and to rebuild my LAB.
But after some conversation on the Community Edition forum I tried what I always do: Turn it off and on again – after the reboot of the Controller VMs (CVMs) the cluster came back and everything was OK!
Another minor issue, the SMTP Configuration check is enabled again on the Community Edition and can’t be disabled at the moment. Note: SMTP Server configuration is not supported in the Community Edition. Maybe this bug will be solved in the next release, the RC1 coming soon…
dready's Blog 
Dready – Thanks for the blog, and thanks for participating in the EA. Glad you were able to get things going! – Jon K
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