Portworx Essentials vs Portworx Enterprise

Hello and welcome back to another Portworx Lightboard Session. My name is Ryan Wallner and today we’re gonna be talking about Portworx Essentials. So what is Portworx essentials and how does it compare to Portworx Enterprise and what you would be using today. Well, as the name suggests, it’s the essentials for running data management on your Kubernetes platform and the benefit here is it is free forever. The benefit here is that if you did not want to fully invest in the Portworx Enterprise is that you can use Portworx Essentials with some features and limits imposed upon it while your cluster is small or you’re starting out your Kubernetes journey in a small way and allow yourself to buy PX-Enterprise later. Or if you kinda don’t expand beyond then, you can still get the benefits of data management from Portworx and what comes with that. So I’m here to explain kind of what you get with it. But remember, you can always upgrade to PX-Enterprise when you’re ready.

So note that I have some features here listed for Portworx Enterprise like a thousand nodes, hundred containers per node, there’s something like a million volumes allowed, 30-day trial off the bat, right? But after the 30-day trial, you can’t do really anything. You get 24/7/365 support and you get all the add-ons available to you in terms of PX-Secure, DR, Migrate, autopilot, all the really enterprise-ready features that you would need at scale running mission critical applications.

Portworx Essentials in the other hand, is probably better suited for kind of a small SMB or even if you have a single application in the Cloud or something like that. And so the kind of a node ratio here is you get five nodes and you get five terabytes total. So what this really means is you get one terabyte per node and your volume limit is one terabyte max per volume. So on one node, you can provision a single PVC that’s one terabyte which may be, you know, perfect for an application running on three nodes or all five or something like that, or you could have a number of small databases using a lot less, 20 gigabytes here, 20 gigabytes there and in that case, you get 30 containers on one of the nodes.

So, whereas a hundred containers it gets kind of shrunk to 30 containers. The other thing is you have community support which means you get access to Portworx Central and you can actually hook up a single Portworx central, Essentials cluster to PX-Central but also Essentials has access to forums, support tickets, and those kind of things that you can utilize from community, but you don’t get the full enterprise support as well. You have to buy then you have access to add ons. So if you want a PX-DR and you’d have to actually buy upgrade to PX-Enterprise and then add your DR. So you don’t really get the DR capability.

Note that you can still use Portworx Essentials for kind of a secure production application because you are allowed snapshots, you get five snapshots for volumes which is good if you were to kind of snapshot a few times a day, those kind of things give yourself a minimum viable way to protect your application. You also get one cloud snap a day which means that if you needed to place your data off site in object storage or somewhere kind of where a disaster couldn’t take out your entire Kubernetes cluster, you can offload it once a day which works pretty well. And things like encryption, you can absolutely still use but you’ll get like a single key cluster-wide versus kind of a complex matrix of volume per key kind of thing.

So note that it is still a very good solution, it’s just scaled down for kind of the smaller clusters, but absolutely still a really great solution for production if you were running at a small scale. But keep in mind that these limitations do really hinder getting to full-scale production and we recommend upgrading to PX-Enterprise but this should give you an idea of what Portworx Essential is all about and definitely go download it, create a spec, use it for forever and I’ll put some links in the description and until next time. Take care.