Charlie,

Nutanix Test Drive is a highly controlled, nested virtualization environment that will not accurately reflect real-world performance. Everything is running as VMs inside other VMs. We don’t recommend running your own workloads in Test Drive. It’s a great tool to learn the Nutanix UI, and how Nutanix features work, but not a good tool for performance, capacity, compatibility, or API testing.

If you want to do any of those things, you can reach out to your Nutanix account team for access to a proof of concept environment on physical hardware Nutanix owns, or give Nutanix Community Edition a try on physical hardware that you control. The first option gives you identical experience to the real world on high performance servers. Community Edition experience and performance is largely dependent on which physical server is used for the installation.

To answer your question specifically, I don’t expect ISO upload or OS installs to work in Nutanix Test Drive outside of the software images that already exist in the environment.