Understanding How The XCP-NG & Xen Orchestra Open Source Virtualization Platform Works

33 thoughts on “Understanding How The XCP-NG & Xen Orchestra Open Source Virtualization Platform Works”

• It's also worth noting that you can take full advantage of Vates support channel during your free trial period of XOA. (You can also request a trial extension if you need more time for testing)

• unrelated to this video, but it looks like netgate has stopped offering free pfsense+ licenses for home users. $400 a year is the cheapest option now.

• Would love to see TrueNAS plugin for this and other plugins for XCP/XEN

• I am excited Tom ❤ thank you for making a new series. I watch your old ones a ton still just modifying them with what I know of UI changes and feature changes by watching Oliver's videos/ forums to supplement.

• @13:34 This is an important point. Although you can run XO on a VM on your XCP-NG pool it is a very good idea to have a XO running somewhere outside the pool. If for some reason the pool will not come back up (often some kind of issue after a HA failover) your pool VMs will not be running and so it is essential to be able to bring up XO somewhere else to be able to quickly examine why the pool won't come up – diagnosing the same with just the xen command line can be a lot more involved.

• Tom, you mentioned external storage, but hyperconverged infrastructure seems like the most efficient use case. Can XCP-ng natively do HCI?

• Oh gosh here we go again! The only dude in the entire world who makes video praising XCP-NG dude stop already! No one has time for another unnecessarily complicated platform. Long live VMware and kvm

• Can’t wait for more of this series

• Nice video, I'm pretty sure it will be linked in our next newsletter 😇

• something I'm confused by is why you now need a citric account for updates. that is really confusing to me and makes me fear a repeat of the redhat centos situation. we are already halfway there I feel like.

• I've watched every video you have done on XCP-NG – each one better than the last. This latest video makes it so easy to made decisions and see how "other solutions" work compared to what we currently using. I really enjoyed this video and learned a LOT! Thank you again for taking the time to do this video!

• The only thing that has bitten us was a recent patch day. Our Synology NFS, borked NFS itself. Suddenly we couldn't load any of our VMs. During the troubleshooting process, someone disconnected the main storage repository (thinking we could reconnect later). Which, you CAN reconnect the VDI's, but if you dont have a backup of your pool META data, your screwed. Somehow, someone thought it was a good idea to disconnect the VM's hard drive references, and put them in their own database. So if the VM loses its SR, it no longer knows what hard drive it originally had. All of the VDI's a GUID based naming, which is impossible to read through and fix yourself. We got lucky, we had a backup of our metadata, AND we only had 30 VMs to recover. So vates support was able to manually walk through the backup, and re-attach each VMs VDI's manually. But if we had, had 1000's of VMs, its a whole other nightmare to recover from. So, small, but super important note: DO NOT DISCONNECT AN SR, EVER. And for the love of gawd, take a pool metadata backup at least daily of ALL of your pools (we didn't have one of our test pool, and now we have had to manually boot 1 VDI at a time to determine which VM it belongs too.

• Can I make some suggestions on topics? I’m looking for basic getting started setting up networks from a very base level from the pif/vif concepts, best practices, how to make changes, setting up vlans, ip addressing set asides. I’ve been running it for six months now but every time I try to move networks around I run into problems that I think is just a lack of a good understanding of the concepts

• It would be nice if you were able to become equally proficient with Proxmox VE so that you would be able to give an in-depth, detailed analysis as to the pros, cons, and differences between the different potential solution paths.

• Great, clear helpful video. Next challenge is making the time to get setup with XCP-NG at home.

• I worked for a hosting provider back in the day when OpenVZ and Xen were your only options. KVM started to become popular, Proxmox allowed OpenVZ/KVM on the same box versus two separate virtualization boxes and Xen kinda faded away from hosting. Some providers still do use it, usually on the back end. OpenVZ was popular due to overselling and "slabbing"- you run OpenVZ within KVM to oversell it like crazy without crashing the system. "ChicagoVPS" (Velocity Servers) got busted slabbing and they did it with all their reseller brands until somebody got really technical and exposed them after the owner heavily denied it.

• As always, thank you for your extensive break-downs. I've been using XCP-NG for a few years now, and couldn't be happier. I replaced my VMWare cluster with it, and am not looking back.

• Two thumbs up for the series.

• Been following your videos in general, and helped me a lot, even did a PoC with XCP-NG @ work. Can't wait for the following videos.

• Thanks Tom! I find on YouTube there aren't many tutorials for XCPNG vs what you find for Proxmox (TechnoT, LLTV, CraftComp, etc). I think we would all appreciate guided tutorials to get you going from start to finish, similar to your pfsense videos ❤

• Xen was my preferred solution as early as 2004, Citrix for a few years in between, and now XCP-ng is my preferred solution since 2020. I'm currently building a business on it. Sadly the entry point of pricing is too steep to begin supporting the project. As soon as I make more money using it I will certainly support Vates.

  I never found running XO as a VM in the pool itself a good solution. I always run XO on a physically separate machine which I can control separate from the pool and its hosts.

• this vs proxmox?

• Question to the audience: can you deploy XCP-NG on multiple remote hosts and have orchestra manage those hosts from a single pane in cloud?

• You forgot to mention how mature the support for windows vm’s is. That’s a major reason why it’s ahead of the other contenders!!

• Good video Tom! Thanks for sharing it with us!💖👍😎JP

• I'd like to see a migration video for the guys on esxi or hyperv going to proxmox

• We actually still use Citrix XenServer with Xen Orchestra! Trying to get us moved over to XCP-NG, but there's still some benefits to having Citrix. First, the enterprise level support arrangement. We have an Support Contract with Citrix and resell our data center services to other clients. Also, we have access to the Citrix drivers and support library as we have an support contract setup with them. However it's supported with Xen Orchestra but there can be some interesting bugs, as both Citrix and XCP-NG are very similar, but they are slightly different as well.

• Thank you for this.
  I've been thinking on switching from Hyper-V to XCP-NG for a while, mostly due to the backup options and this video made it a lot more clear.

• Proxmox > XCP-NG

• I tried moving from proxmox to XCP-NG recently and I wanted to love it but I just couldn’t. To me the Xen Orchestra Web UI was just not very straightforward, it was particularly confusing around storage, and I ran into a couple small but confusing bugs within the UI.

  I love the idea of the project, and I have no issue with the hypervisor but the Xen Orchestra Web UI just bottom line feels kind of painful to use, and when they require you to pay to automatically keep your software up to date it kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I feel like auto-updates shouldn’t really fall under the support umbrella.

  I ended up finding a desktop application called XenAdmin that seemed a lot nicer to use, but it’s deprecated / unmaintained at the moment.

• It’s always a good day when Tom drops XCP-NG content!

• RIP Xen.

• Just spun up my first XCP-ng cluster this week because of your videos, keep them coming!

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