Portworx Essentials
Portworx Essentials is a free Portworx license with limited functionality that allows you to run small production or proof-of-concept workloads. Essentials limits capacity and advanced features, but otherwise functions the same way as the fully-featured PX-Enterprise version of Portworx.
The Portworx Essentials license requires that your clusters be connected to the internet and send usage data to PX-Central. Portworx Essentials clusters connect with PX-Central once per hour to renew license leases. Lease periods last for 24 hours, ensuring that any temporary interruptions to your connectivity do not impact your cluster.
To get started with Portworx Essentials, sign up and generate a spec on PX-Central. Licenses for Essentials are generated automatically and activate when your cluster connects to PX-Central.
Portworx Essentials available features and limitations
The following tables list what features Portworx Essentials supports and any limitations it may have:
Portworx Essentials
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Maximum Portworx Essentials licenses per user | 1 |
| Maximum clusters per Portworx Essentials license | 1 |
| Maximum nodes per cluster | 5 |
| Host type supported | VMs and bare metal servers |
| Max containers mounting volumes per host | 30 |
| Host storage capacity limits | 1TB per host |
| Cluster storage capacity limits | 5TB per cluster |
| Support (includes updates, upgrades) | Online Support |
| Telemetry requirement (install/operate) | Users must have telemetry enabled in order to use Portworx Essentials. |
| Licensing | Users must have a Portworx Essentials license (available for free at PX-Central) |
PX-Store
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Container-optimized volumes with elastic scaling (no application downtime) | Supported |
| Maximum number of volumes per cluster | 500 |
| Maximum volume size | 1TB |
| Storage performance tiers (high, medium, low) | Supported |
| Application-aware I/O tuning | Supported |
| Read/Write many across multiple containers | Supported |
| Failover across nodes, racks, and availability zones | Supported |
| Form storage pools from aggregated volumes across hosts | Supported |
| Synchronous Replication | Supported |
| Volume Consistency Groups | Supported |
Data Management
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| PX-Migrate: Migrate volumes and Kubernetes applications across clusters. | Not supported |
| Snapshots of stateful applications | Limited to 5 snapshots per volume |
| Cloudsnap backups to cloud storage | Limited to 1 cloudsnap per day per volume |
| Auto-scaling groups (ASG) with support for AWS, GCP, Azure. | Supported |
PX-Central
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Cluster management UI | Single user, single cluster |
| Proactive centralized monitoring | Supported |
| Cluster management CLI | Supported |
| PX-Central on-premises with license server | Not Supported |
Advanced Functionality
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Security and identity integrated with Kubernetes namespace and OIDC providers | Not Supported |
| Encryption with bring-your-own-encryption | Limited to cluster-wide encryption |
| Disaster Recovery for campus and WAN deployments | Not supported |
| Capacity Management with Autopilot | Not supported |
Orchestrator
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| Scheduler integration: Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, Openshift | Supported |
| Integration with Managed K8S services: EKS, AKS, GKE, PKS, IKS, RKE | Supported |
Related Topics
Get started with Portworx Essentials now:
Find answers to common questions on the Portworx Essentials FAQ: