What is Reddit's opinion of
XCP-ng?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
66 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
It's a full-featured XenServer rebuild from source. I have no idea what the hell Citrix was thinking when they tried to make an OSS product 'crippleware' to force license buying. Incredibly ill-concieved decision.
This may not be a common recommendation, but I actually really like it...
I'm not using it at home, because I won a VMUG Advantage subscription, and need to keep up to date with vmware tech. I've used XCP-NG in the past, and like it for the most part. It's constantly getting better. It's basically a XenServer fork, with some open-source stuff for a html front-end (Xen Orchestra). You can compile that front-end in a minute or two to get ALL of the features with no nagging ^((To be clear, it's free, I hesitate to call it 'nagging')). They also have a "Thick" client that's just a fork of the old XenServer thick client.
It may not be the answer to all of your problems, but it sure is at LEAST an interesting thing to look into.
You want XCP-NG... https://xcp-ng.org/
It is all of Xenserver without the Citrix licensing restrictions. It supports pass through. If you’re mostly happy with and well versed in Xenserver, you’ll take to XCP quickly.
I was able to upgrade from Xenserver to XCP in under half an hour and didn’t lose any of my VMs in the process.
This is a very viable solution. My primary Pi-hole + Unbound setup is a little Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 LTS VM (1vCPU, 1024MB RAM) and spinning rust is just fine, I have one of mine on a little 160GB 10k rpm Velociraptor, which is sufficient to perform blacklisting for the thirty, or so clients that are on our network. Secondary Pi-hole, Unbound + Wireguard (was OpenVPN Server until just the other week when i borked the Raspbian 10 Lite (buster) upgrade and had to start fresh) operates on a RPi3B+ with 16GB micro SD card which is kind of overkill, but I can throw more threads at my Unbound config, i guess. My bottleneck right now is my shoddy 50Mbps upstream... but I shouldn't complain, super blessed to have 1000Mbps fiber, even if it's not symmetrical.
I love your creativity, but for DNS it's nice to have redundancy. I hear Proxmox is fantastic, or even XCP-ng if you aren't into the aforementioned hypervisors, but any old PC lying around will run circles around a Pi-hole installation. Go all out, add Unbound or DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS and become your own little recursive nameserver, at least on your own setup, if not for anyone else. Wish I knew more, but i'm all thumbs with Docker it seems... i have to fumble around with Portainer to perform the basics. The networking portion eludes me, but I've got a buncha containers running on a Debian VM for my networking management, but that's pretty brainless to maintain for the most part. Have to remember to turn Cloudflare off, otherwise my SSL certs don't get automatically renewed.
Since you are exporting your VMs, it would be much easier to just drop in XenServer on top of it.
Instead of the regular XenServer, I would suggest to use the community based XCP-NG, made by the fine folks from XenOrchestra.
KVM is great. If you want web management, Proxmox is king and free for home use; very powerful and you can cluster if you end up with a couple more servers :). My casual observation - Proxmox is overtaking ESX in the homelab type environment. There are other KVM web management projects that might suit your needs although don't appear to be actively maintained (Kimchi and Archipel). Cockpit Project is maintained and offers rudimentary VM management from a web GUI. You can also run virtual machine manager, a GUI application for KVM management. If you go the cluster route, oVirt is a Red Hat project. Lots of options under KVM.
Now I'm guessing you know this, but there is a community fork of XenServer: https://xcp-ng.org/
Run servers on XCP-NG hypervisor. Have multiple hosts. Backup entire VMs to other hosts using built in XCPng backup task. Incremental forever backups.
A bit late to the party but yes, it's possible, no changes needed to the hypervisor. I forwarded the PCIe device of an RTX3090 (and one of the USB controllers for keyboard&mouse) to a windows VM and installed the latest nVidia driver (466.11) and the screen started working.
For PCIe passthrough: https://xcp-ng.org/docs/compute.html
As far as I know, nothing fully automated like VMware. I believe you can do FT networking. This might be a question/feature request for someone at Vates. You can search their forum for more information. I'm sure this has probably already been asked.
I have been deploying XCP-NG with Xen Orchestra. XCP-NG is a fork of the Citrix Hypervisor (formerly called xenserver) and Xen Orchestra is a web based appliance like vCenter which was developed for managing the Citrix Hypervisor and now XCP-NG.
So for background on how I use it, most of my clients as well as my own infrastructure are pretty small. I have heard examples of this being used at scale, but I have no experience with it myself, and the last larger deployment I did was VMWare.
I started by moving my own infrastructure to XCP-NG probably about two years ago or so, and it works well as a hypervisor. I have gone through many minor and a couple of major releases in that time with zero issues upgrading on a variety of industry standard servers with Intel processors. (There were some issues with AMD processors I think, but I think that may have been solved.) At first I was managing it with XCP-NG Center which is a Windows Client software that is nearly deprecated and is similar to the old vSphere client. There are still a few tasks in there that I cannot do with Xen Orchestra as easily or at all, but I have since implemented Xen Orchestra. A really big advantage to this over vCenter is integrated backups and replication. Otherwise the two are very similar. All of this is open source, but there are support options through Vates, who are the main developers. I have used the forums and communicated with the developers directly regarding a couple of minor issues and questions I had in prior versions. As responsive as they are in the community forums, I would guess that the paid support is top notch.
No I never did. I made a post on the XCP-NG forums (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/2102/weird-issue-with-pcie-passthrough-and-xcp-ng-xenserver/9), where we basically concluded there was something weird with my particular server's BIOS that made iommu not work properly on Linux. My solution was to switch to vmware esxi (and since the kernel is not linux, pcie pass-through worked perfectly), and for my use case this is fine. If you want to continue some research here is what I suspect may be an issue: I read on some manufacturer's website (i think i discussed this in that other thread) that you need e5 v2 CPUs for SR-IOV/iommu to work properly, which doesn't make much sense but that's all I got to go off. I also haven't tried updating the centos kernel on XCP-NG through unofficial methods, but that has the huge probability of breaking things so I never bothered. Finally, there was a BIOS update for my server to fixed the speculative execution vulnerabilities with the CPUs, and I have not tried it on that version.
Use XCP-ng, the open source fork of Citrix XenServer. Then use Xen Orchestra to set up your VMs. Use the NVMe drive as VM datastore and passthrough the SATA controller to the FreeNAS VM.
That's how i have it running right now. Everything open source, no license costs.
Copy on write is the default way to work when you create a snapshot or a new VM in fast clone.
Disk space used is not related to copy on write, but thin vs thick SR type. It's documented here: https://xcp-ng.org/docs/storage.html#storage-types
I imagine your frustration. you could try some other things I have in mind:
- try booting the host with gpu cables unplugged (as u/jaredearle suggested) from the monitor, only plug it after proxmox has already booted and blacklisted the drivers
- try booting a ubuntu desktop live usb to check if extracting the romfile works this time (if it doesn't, you can also try switching gpus position in slots)
if none of this works and you are interested in testing other hypervisor that may work best with your use case (because its constructed to operate headless), look for xcp-ng https://xcp-ng.org/ guides are a little hard to find but I can give you directions if you want, I use this on my homelab (have all features that proxmox have)
I was going based off of this from XCP-ng's documentation, which I have managed to get "working" but the VMs crash shortly after (still diagnosing this one, some kind of driver problem): https://xcp-ng.org/docs/compute.html#vgpu
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In terms of pooling, I'm not sure what the main difference would be, from what I understand you could have say 4 AMD GPUs installed and just select which one for each VMs vGPU. Am I missing something or would pooling sort of just make this easier in terms of selecting the right GPU (and maybe some automation behind load balancing or something)?
The XCP-ng forum usually is very supporting to discuss issues like this (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/). The XCP-ng and Xenorchestra team is regularly answering to questions and the community is rather active. Maybe worth a try.
There's also a script available written by another nperson which will automate the deployment of a Libre (Free) Edition (aka "From the sources" version) of XOA for you in a matter of minutes. Give this a look: https://github.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater
I heavilly use XCP-NG here at home and so do my buddies. In fact just last night i deployed a fresh install of XCP-NG 8.2 onto a Cisco UCSC C240 M4SX that i just recieved, plonked some LSI Nytro SSD PCI-E cards in (1 for host storage, 2 for vNAS Cache), as well as 12x 1TB 2.5" SAS drives, deployed a TrueNas VM, and PCI-E Passthru'd the onboard SAS Controller and LSI cards to it to create in effect a Virtual Nas. while the onboard card is technically a raid controller, it also supports JBOD mode. Using Raid Z2 with a hot spare and cold spare for 6.5TB of effective available hdd space and i have enough empty bays to double that.
Heres a guide on PCI-E Passthru should you need it: https://xcp-ng.org/docs/compute.html#pci-passthrough
Just note that you Should NOT be installing XCP-NG (or XenServer / Proxmox for that matter) to USB Drives as it is totally NOT Supported usually and it will kill most regular USB's and SD cards quick smart. I'm playing with fire on my host by using Mirror'ed SD cards on the internal SD Slots in the UCSC for boot, however I am using high endurance Samsung cards, and storing VM's on one of the LSI cards.
@OP if you need any guidance with setup and use, feel free to drop me a message and i'll be glad to help ya.
Yeah, xe CLI is powerful but you need to be fluent in UUIDs :p Don't forget auto completion, really nice to help.
Frankly, Xen Orchestra is the best tool to manage your cluster, I'm a former sysadmin (before creating my company) and still using it almost every day to manage our own infrastructure. I prefer than than using xe ;) (that's the reason why I created it in the first place).
You are also very welcome on XCP-ng/XO forums if you need assistance for your home lab!
True regarding 'will make more money'
But you didn't speak about the xen hypervisor aspect. The hardware virtualization improves performance, security, etc.
Basically the main thing I am talking about. And this isn't a stable or distributed product, yet. The only peopke with experience in this, are like the 11 global contributors to the OSP.
So, running xen now, or not, SW xen VMs are just not the same topic as hardware virutualization of xen, and it's implications.
Speculative is not, in general, a performance hit. And here is the BIGGIE: vulnerabilities? Not if it's hardware*!!!
I anticipate, if companies would like to have a truly secure kernel, they will elect for this option (once mature), as it will be performance boosting, and surface area eliminating.
Sorry I'm being breif on the whole thing, but you are right regarding xen as it currently stands, but I disagree regarding future implications. Yet, still agree that investing there really isn't a coattail to ride here.
Check it out: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2020/06/03/device-emulation-in-the-xen-hypervisor/amp/
Proxmox or XCP-NG might be better if you're going to be using consumer level parts. XCP-NG is pretty much CentOS7 with the Xen hypervisor so it has a pretty broad range of device drivers.
I have ESX 7 running on an Intel Skull Canyon NUC that I picked up cheap(ish). But if you need an additional NIC you have to load USB drivers for an ESX compatible dongle. Which makes it a bit of a pain to upgrade.
That's not true anymore ;) XCP-ng provides both community and pro support (see https://xcp-ng.org and https://xcp-ng.com), all of that with a VERY simple business model (support per host and per year, not by sockets or cores or any artificial VMware limitations)
He no-ship,
What you should check:
- put a static ip to your ubuntu and see if the network is working fine.
- if yes check what's behind eth1 on your network if dhcp is activated.
I recommend you to post on official forum to get more action on that.
For me this only works with more server dedicated gpu's like the S7150. For consumer/ prosumer gpu's I dont use the XOA gpu passthrough. I'd recommend using the one specified in the docs: https://xcp-ng.org/docs/compute.html#pci-passthrough
https://xcp-ng.org/docs/guests.html
Have you given this a read?
It says that you shouldn't be mixing the Citrix drivers with xcp-ng. It's also stressing the importance of not running the windows update until the guest tools are installed.
u/BoriskaPipiska u/UnikAnvaendare Confirmed this was a bug with the XCP-NG team; they're going to investigate. Thanks!
https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/4253/host_not_enough_free_memory
For thermal and power, take a look at the technical guide for the R720, it should be written there.
For partitioning your GPU I have no experience with XCPNG but I know other Hypervisors can do it, I personally use Hyper-V and it seems to work pretty well even if not currently officially supported, but at least it’s free. I think others require some expensive 3rd party options like from Nvidia but I’m not too sure.
It seems that for XCPNG it’s either pass through or proprietary solutions https://xcp-ng.org/docs/compute.html#usb-passthrough
I have a completely different solution for you. XCP-NG
It's open source and that's what I'm using for my home. I run FreeNAS in a VM and do pcie passthrough to the LSI raid card. And you can passthrough any PCIE device, including USB hubs. It's basically an opensource alternative to xenserver. You can also install Xen orchestra for a web UI.
Way past my pay-grade as they say on XCP-NG but I would recommend asking your question here as well, as the team seems more active there and overall quite helpful
I dont know Xen, but it seems you cant exclude it: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/2571/back-up-only-the-os-disk
Normally I would decouple the data from the hypervisor, but thats just my opinion, your solution shouldnt be that bad with the disk1 in ds1 and disk2 in ds2.
My setup has the pros that you can snapshot the VM without the datadisk, because its mounted via iSCSI from my Storage/NAS
My Setup: ESXi with Fileserver and OS DISK on Datastore <- NAS/Storage (TrueNAS) with iSCSI Datastore connected to Fileserver OS (Windows Server) via iSCSI Initiator / MPIO.
EDIT: I know thats not a 100% answer to your questions, but maybe it gives some ideas to change things for your needs)
If you are using xenorchestra you can enable driver install via windows update. It will say tools aren’t installed but the drivers will be.
There are also community tools available from xcp-ng but ymmv
You COULD get all of VMWARE and run that. Join VMUG, get the hobbyist license deal for $550USD for three years. It's good. Or run full Proxmox. Works well, fast, stable. Doesn't have VMWARE bells and whistles but it is free. Or, XCP-ng. My favorite. (I run all three.) I am a huge fan since it's stable, community supported, robust. Easy to manage and FREE.
https://xcp-ng.org/ https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership
First off, max out the ram if possible. Quick search shows you can have up to 24GB in there. Second, pick up a ssd. Finally look at getting a raid card thats been flashed to it mode. What you can then do, is pass this entire card and all the attached storage drives to a Truenas vm.
Install a hypervisor of some sort as the primary os. Your choices are ESXI, Proxmoxand XCP-NG. There are others, but pick one of these to start with. All have their merits so pick whichever looks good. I personally use esxi installed to a usb flash drive so I have all the larger drives left to use for other things.
I'm a huge fan of Truenas, but it is sub par when it comes to messing around with virtual machines. Much better to have this in a vm and use a dedicated hypervisor for experimenting with other things.
As for cool things you can do with this set up..... check our /r/selfhosted and /r/homelab for inspiration.
There's a wall-o-text to read through, but this guy has a high availability setup running to control his reef aquarium system. I think he said that the HA setups monitor each other and take over if one appears to have failed. There's a three hundred plus comment thread linked in the post that has details of the HA setup: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/3550/personal-testimony-edge-case-2-protectli-hardware
I don't know what many of those things are you mentioned but :) today I was trying out xen on debian, before I used esxi but I want open source, so they have this flavor of xen that has a gui but I haven't tried it https://xcp-ng.org/
On xen I did make a virtual bridge which gets assigned IP where the nic does layer 2, which was fairly easy, installed a debian virtual machine and logged into it via console, but all of this is in terminal. I couldn't figure out how to install windows yet, had to go to sleep.
Most of the issues with Proxmox is lack of understanding of Linux followed by not mapping out the hosts hardware to masking so that shit isnt changing on reboots (ZFS and NIC's I am looking at you). I have been running Proxmox since 6.0 and have had no major issues that could not be resolved inside of the Linux Shell.
Short of that, VMware vSphere is where its at. HyperV is windows based and the professional in me just says 'Nope' about it. But then there is https://xcp-ng.org/ and similar projects that are a good consideration as well.
But for me, Its Proxmox vs VMware as far as solutions go. Though I am keeping an eye on Xi systems TrueNAS since they are throwing KVM on top with a full HA implementation soon.
> I'm reading through migration strategies, and it looks like you have to export a given vm to an ovf, then import it into proxmox..is that right?
It is one of approaches. If you have two servers – old with vSphere, new with Proxmox – ovftool can be installed on proxmox and VM will be migrated with command:
ovftool vi://root@<ip-of-esxi>/<name-of-a-virtual-machine> /mnt/pve/<storage>
V2V converters can be used, if you prefer to change vdisk from vmdk to qcow or raw. For example - www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter
> in raid 6 (though considering 10 or even just sticking with 5 since vCenter was going to be a storage hog)
I’d avoid using RAID5 with spindle drives. RAID10 is best from performance perspective, RAID6 for highest redundancy.
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P.S. As proxmox alternative you can take a look at XCP-NG xcp-ng.org
I always recommend https://xcp-ng.org/ mainly because it CentOS (Red Hat)Based and i'm more familiar with those systems.
Not saying that one is better than the other, just an option but If you are familiar with Ubuntu, Proxmox is debian based, so that will feel more familiar to you if you ever have to tinker within the system (not the interface).
I have it setup on its own "bare-metal" then I have the control interface deployed as a container on my laptop, when I need to do something that requires the interface, I bring up the container etc, then I stop the container when not needed.
You could have the same control container manage multiple xcp-ng servers too.
FWIW, XCP-NG is what used to be xen-server (not sure if Citrix still markets it)
- XAPI is the API on XCP-ng (cf the issue, we had 2 ways to do that: a modification of the API or XO). FYI, there's no officially supported desktop client for XCP-ng (XCP-ng Center is only community maintained and will probably disappear in the future, replaced by XO Lite, see https://xcp-ng.org/docs/management.html )
- If you are using it in your home lab, there's no locked XO feature while using it from the sources. If you talk about our turnkey virtual appliance, XOA, then this won't change anything if you are using delta backup (it will automatically switch to
VDI.snapshotinstead ofVM.snapshot)
Hi /u/uberbewb
Firstly... Don't even think about paying for that licensing at full price for self-education!!! I'm sure there are a few programs out there, the one I would point you towards is the VMUG group, its like $200 USD (Link: https://community.vmug.com/vmug2019/membership/membership-benefits )
If you’re developing a product or capability on top of a hypervisor or that leverages capabilities of the hypervisor layer, I would recommend VMware, this will give you a huge install base that will be familiar how to run your product. Much better than making them add a new hypervisor platform into their environment.
Also, I looked briefly at Xen and XCP, I really liked the look of XCP-NG (https://xcp-ng.org/) it made a platform to build off. I’ll be honest, for me it was a flip of the coin when I made the choice to go down the Proxmox path (more experience with Debian was a key factor).
Also, the RedHat stack is really interesting and has a huge amount of capability, with RHEL, OpenStack, OpenShift, Cockpit, and AnsibleTower you have an entire world of things.
xcp-ng is a Xen hypervisor fork of Citrix after they basically screwed their customer base and was started / is run by some of their expats. Being used in datacenters now with excellent remote management capabilities using Xen orchestrator. The community version is free (Red Hat / Centos model)
I would say: start on XCP-ng -totally Open Source fork of XenServer- on old/spare hardware, and play with its API/CLI. You can also use Xen Orchestra on top of it, which is great because it also has an API and a CLI, but can be the unique central point for larger infrastructure (unlike the host API which is only "pool wide").
Feel free to go on XCP-ng forums to ask around, community there is great!:
XCP-NG is another free alternative. You can install Xen Orchestra from source and get all features enabled for free (including VM and hypervisor backups). If you prefer there is a docker alternative.
For anyone else who is asking the same question, it doesn't seem like the XCP-NG team is interested in adding the feature. While SPICE is technically part of the Xen hypervisor, it would apparently take a lot of work to get it to XCP-NG. https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/2732/adding-spice-support-to-xcp-ng-vms/3
XCP-ng is an open source fork from the same family as Citrix xenserver, it provides all the same features as fully fledged VMware when combined the Xen Orchestrator which is also open source. It supports both paravirtualisation and hardware assisted virtualization, it can be managed from a desktop client or through a web interface (Xen Orchestrator). We really liked the easy to set up self service web portal, we're using it to allow users to restart their own machines etc.
It's super flexible about the underlying storage as well, you can use local, NFS, SMB or iscsi storage
Xen orchestra is fundamentally free and open source but the bundled startup page will encourage you to deploy a version built by the company that they charge for, you can build your own for free from source and there are tons of automated scripts out there.
Virtualization of GPU's, at least for consumer (gaming and desktop streaming) purposes, would best be accomplished on AMD technology, known as MxGPU (SR-IOV.) This is due to the open source (i.e. free) drivers, as well as it lacking the restrictions and licensing ($$$) requirements found with Nvidia. AMD's cards supporting this are found in the FirePRO line.
Sadly, all isn't sunshine and roses in the AMD world either. The AMD solution brings it's own set of challenges. While it certainly gets you around the terrible licensing and driver restrictions present with NVIDIA's offering, the latest gen GPU technology you'd ideally want in the FirePRO line, costs on average around $3-4K. The affordable cards supporting this GPU virtualization feature are now older (though still capable to allow multi-seat, single host gaming setups).
You could use: https://xcp-ng.org/, mated it with something like the AMD FirePRO 7150 X2 from EBAY for $300-$40 to host a pile of WIN 10 vm's. This could give you a decent multi-headed setup, sharing the GPU (no 1 to 1 mapping like with pass-through), that serves something as simple as raspberry pi's for the client... Clearly I've been chasing the white rabbit for some time. Moral of the story, It's all still very prohibitive still, so depending on use-case, YMMV.
Have you thought about moving to XCP-ng? FOSS solution based on Xen, you can even upgrade directly from Xen should you be inclined. Management interfaces are the same -- you can run the Windows based XCP-ng Center (instead of of Xen Center) or the web based Xen Orchestra (appliance install without paid features or you can compile from source with everything unlocked).
If it can't be installed off a software raid, then why would that be an option in XCP-ng 8.0? This website talks about it being added in version 7.5.
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2018/09/21/xcp-ng-new-install-features/
Standard practice....do most people install to a single bootable hard drive instead of a raid drive?
XCP-ng (https://xcp-ng.org/) is a hypervisor and Xen Orchestra (XO) is the web-based management tool.
XCP-ng Center is a Windows GUI management tool. (https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases)
XO can also do a ton of different types of backups as well. Documentation is really good: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/
You can pass is through but the driver will not initialize the device.
I just did some experimentation with this at work.
Nvidia locks down the drivers so that virtualizing GPU is only possible on the insanely expensive vGPU cards like the Tesla or Quadro chips.
If you're willing to use the "patched" drivers. XCP-NG is a great platform. The open-source community-supported build of Citrix Xenserver.
I wasn't aware of that. They don't seem to have trademark on it, and the letters 'xcp' are used in other contexts (e.g.), so I assume for now that it's OK. I'll ponder the naming though.
Hi,
XCP-ng forum might be a better place to ask.
Also, the error code alone is not really useful, do you have more trace? How are you trying to create this local SR anyway?
I said XCP-ng, but should have said Xen, to sum up Nvidia check if the system runs in a virtual machine and if it's a consumer card then it spits "Error 43: Driver failed to load" unless you are able to hide it (because hobbyist that can't afford pro cards and prefer to reuse old card are unworthy)
There is a small explanation here and there has been some topics open on the XCP-ng forums as well like here and mentioned here as well
I found a solution to my issue and I have to think others have had the same question.
My laptop’s NIC was behaving like a manged switch that Unifi didn’t have access to manage so I took this opportunity to learn something new and came across XCP-ng:
It’s an open source version if Xenserver and functions similarly to VMware ESXi. When building some sample VMs in the environment, I found that the server NIC was able to pass the virtual MAC addresses to the Unifi USG like an unmanaged switch.
I just needed the right tool for the job.
This is doable in multiple ways but:
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- please upgrade your 6.5, it's dangerous to use this one nowadays (alternatively, you can switch to [XCP-ng](https://xcp-ng.org) if you don't have any Citrix license)
- you can use a Xen Orchestra job to pause or hibernate your VMs at night for example, and wake them up when needed
- you can use Xen Orchestra ACLs to delegate VMs controls to your users, to let them suspend/resume their VMs when they want
Xen Orchestra can provide some stats and alerting (also an easier API to send data to a supervision thing).
I would also suggest Netdata on each node, and if you want, to stream metrics on a central netdata instance. XCP-ng team is currently working on a netdata package, but you can install it manually. Feel free to reach XCP-ng forum for deeper discussions on this :)
I am curious, why are you moving away from Xenserver? If it's because of the changes in the last few version (mostly around licenced features) have you looked at XCP-ng? Its basically a completely open and unrestricted version of Xenserver that is 100% compatible with it (so all the add-on solutions and softwares will work).
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We run all our stuff on Xen, and I will shifting us over to XPC over the summer, which should be easy as it is basically an in-place upgrade to Xen (similar to how you go from an old version of Xen to a new one).
I love oVirt, been using it for a couple of years now. I started using it when Proxmox started putting community updates behind paywall, which as of this writting would cost me about $968 CAD per year ($121 per socket for 8 cpu sockets). Utterly ridiculous money to spend on a homelab. I can buy 5x barbones Dell R610 servers for that money!
I have 4x hosts (oVirt Node) and 2x storage servers (FreeNAS) and it runs like a dream! Using oVirt Hosted-Engine very simular to using VMware's vCenter, although there are some minor quirks in the UI portal. The learning curve was a little steep, but if you've used VMware and you know your way around CentOS, it's not that bad.
I've got scheduled scripts for backing up the hosted-engine & vm's and both FreeNAS servers are mirrored for data redundancy.
As for other solutions, you might want to checkout XCP-ng and Orchastra (the community edition). XCP-ng run on a customized version of CentOS, with it's own cli commands, just like oVirt.
Hi,
Citrix XenServer doesn't support ext4 as far as I know.
Maybe you can try with XCP-ng 7.6 which now supports ext4 (https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2019/01/15/ext4-support-in-xcp-ng/).
All the best!
Not to deter you from Proxmox... I use it myself, and think it's great, but in your case wouldn't moving to something like XCP-ng https://xcp-ng.org/ be more advisable. It's a fork of Xen and migrating should be much easier. Have you looked at it and ruled it out?
Not answering your question, but have your heard of XCP-ng? If leaving XenServer for their changes for licensing, XCP-ng have forked it. I'm tempted to get it a spin.
Thats not too bad. It can handle some VMs. If you want to go with Xen you might want to take a look at this: https://xcp-ng.org/ And concerning the amount of VMs, you don't have to run all of them all the time, just create as many as you need and try to use thin provisioned vHDDs. And please run the SSDs and the HDDs in a Raid 1 at least to have some security. Maybe consider getting a small NAS for regular backups next.
Hey there :) Take a look at this topic: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/935/xcp-ng-in-production
I'm quoting one post there:
> nhanlon 7 days ago > Can confirm; Running 200+ hosts in a production environment (will eventually be over 800)
XCP-ng is the actual hypervisor (the thing running/controlling the VMs). Xen Orchestra is a web interface used to easily create, manage, etc the VMs on XCP-ng. Without it, you'd have to use either the XCP-ng Center (Windows only) or the command line to do all of that. Proxmox has this built in. So if you install Proxmox it's the hypervisor and has a web ui for administering everything.
xcp-ng. Which is the fully open source version of XenServer (technically CentOS on Xen).
Previously used VMWare, switched due to their website, driver problems. Then used Citrix's free tier of XenServer, switched to xcp-ng when Citrix screwed over the licenses.
The new open source rage is xcp-ng essentially replacing xenserver. Take a look.
Though I still currently run ESXI on my homelab because that's what I know, I've been thinking about switching.