What is Reddit's opinion of
Xen Orchestra?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
37 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I use Xen Server with Xen Orchestra. The free version is enough to provide a web interface. It uses 2GB of RAM and 15GB of disk space, but it's pretty cool and the premium version is free for 30 days. I don't use the premium version at home, but I have at work and it was worth it for the backup features.
Hi guys! Xen Orchestra is fully Open Source and works with XenServer 7 out-of-the-box (without anything to install on your host).
By the way, XO is far more than "just" a web UI for XenServer, you got backups, self-service, ACLs, load-balancing, replication etc.
And there is a version 5 coming soon with a great new UI!
Hi there :)
Disclaimer: XOA project leader here :)
If you want something working out-of-the-box: XOA Starter (cheapest edition with support and updater), and no socket/host/VM limit.
We are currently working on improving the backup stuff, we'll have reports/alerts and maybe delta VHD for the end of the year, and yes, it will be in Starter.
You also have 15 days of trial with all features if you want to make some tests for free!
edit: and if you have suggestion of features and other stuff to improve it, I'm always happy to ear it for improving the product!
Another option would be xenserver with xencenter, openxenmanager or xen orchestra.
I don't have any experience with other hypervisors but XCP-NG has been great for me. Xen Orchestra is a pretty nice UI for it. You can get full Xen Orchestra enterprise features unlocked for free if you are willing to forgo support.
I have a pool of three servers and it's incredibly easy to move VMs around, even between servers while the VM is running.
It was really easy for me as someone new to hypervisors to set up and use. Lawrence Systems has several videos on XCP-NG and Xen Orchestra if you are interested.
Grab a read of https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/reverse_proxy.html - it's the guide followed to set this up at home. Note, you do not need port 22 forwarded, you just need the reverse proxy configured correctly.
We use XenServer at my workplace and have ~80-90 Xen hosts across four clusters. It does virtualization pretty well. That being said, there's a couple of drawbacks:
- There's no web GUI out-of-the-box. You can go for a third-party solution like Xen Orchestra that offers both free and paid tiers depending on your needs, otherwise your best bet is CLI commands or the native Windows XenCenter client.
- Be prepared to pay for one of the enterprise versions if you care about GPU virtualization or some of the extra reporting features.
Other than that, it's not bad. Personally, if I could go back in time and change the way my company does things, I would've steered us towards KVM + Proxmox.
I haven't used Proxmox, but can speak a bit about XenServer.
XenServer doesn't seem very popular on here. ESXi, HyperV and Proxmox are the most. I think part of this may be due to the fact that XenServer prior to 6.5 was not entirely free, and setting up your own Dom0 on Linux was pretty nightmarish. The state of documentation on the hypervisor itself used to be horrifying.
I will say this - I've been using XenServer 6.5 for about two and a half years. It's been incredibly stable, and has had better performance than ESXi had on the same hardware. I really like it.
With regards to the five servers, are you planning to cluster them? If so, look into Xen cpu masking - It really doesn't like different model CPUs in the same cluster. Make sure you're ready to wade into that if you're going to.
Otherwise, both Xen Center (windows only) and Xen Orchestra will let you manage multiple Xen hosts from a single console.
From what I saw in the past, VMware has a better cluster manager (vCenter) and the VM disk volume management is a bit easier. As you wrote, vCenter is commercial software. For your use-case, I think that XenServer is a good and free alternative.
I would not recommend NAS execpt for a very small (2-3 host max) setup. To work around NAS becoming a bottleneck, I used the NAS as VM-image store (read-only) and provisioned the Xen VMs inside the local datastore on the XenServer.
Generally, try to have a dedicated network to isolate storage traffic. Or go for a SAN.
If you don't want to use the XenCenter Windows client, then you can check out XenOrchestra (https://xen-orchestra.com/), it's a free Web Management-UI for XenServer hosts, similar to VMware Vcenter.
Or, if you want to do an IaaS-type setup, Apache Cloudstack works well with XenCenter and has less configure-knobs than OpenStack.
Xen Orchestra is also looking really good. They recently added scheduled snapshots, remote backups, continuous delta backups, and continuous replication.
https://xen-orchestra.com/ If you want to download an appliance and get support
https://github.com/vatesfr/xo If you're comfortable installing the software yourself and don't need support.
Hey guys! We managed to release a great 4.12 with:
I wrote an article about that: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-and-vm-high-availability/
Nevertheless, there is room for higher level features, like:
- adjusting load automatically
- or schedule migration/Wake on LAN servers for planned scenarios
And that's the point of XOA Premium (+ data viz). For sure, it will be available on GitHub.
About helping the "masses": we deeply believe in Open Source, so we believe in the community as well :)
Luckily the new XenServer releases are open source and they have added the patching mechanism into XenCenter without needing to pay. Take a look at Xen Orchestra as a good web console for XenServer management.
I just started to use xenserver on my lab, so far has worked incredibly well. Can also be managed from webserver with https://xen-orchestra.com/#/ so you dont have to have Windows client for Xencenter to manage the server.
edit. Wow, thanks for the gold!
Hi,
Requirement is a bit unclear but: * You can use Xen Orchestra ACLs for that purpose. See https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/users.html#acls * But accessing a VNC console isn't really remote desktop to "work" with (check UDS Enterprise for a real Open Source virtual desktop infrastructure solution)
If it's just giving basic access to a terminal/console, ACLs are enough. If you want to prove a real virtual desktop, then go for UDS.
> First, you are talking about Xen Orchestra, not XCP-ng.
Sorry, my bad
> Have you read https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/installation.html#banner-and-warnings
Yes, and it in no way adresses my issue.
Oh, I didn't follow that thread ( https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-lite/ ) but nonetheless, I still like the UI of the XCP-ng Center. It reminds me of similar commercial products and fits my workflow.
But yeah, I can see the appeal of having a mgmt website directly in the server host.
You can check XenOrchestra https://xen-orchestra.com/ , it works both with XenServer and XCP-NG (a FOSS fork of XenServer) and it has a similar solution to Veaam Backup with incremental snapshot backups https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-features/backup . It works really great, using it in production for more than a year.
XOA is the paid product that includes support. Mainly for production use. But because XOA is fully open source, you have the option to compile it yourself and unlock everything that is in XOA Premium with no charge of course (and no support other than the forums).
There are plenty of github scripts that can do this automatically. That is the exact one I have been using for over a year.
Xen Orchestra. That's the strongly suggested solution, at least the one with the most people working on it and close links to XCP-ng team too.
Note that's fully Open Source, and you can install it on any Linux/FreeBSD you want:
So which setup then? XO or Netdata (or both?)? For netdata, we have a test RPM package that might do the trick for a PoC, I can help you to set this up.
The best place for that would be to create a private ticket on https://xen-orchestra.com (you can do this even as a XOA Free user) so we could discuss freely about all details of your infrastructure :)
I would say Xen Orchestra with the XCP-ng virtualization engine is nice and probably the best choice for small to medium sized clusters. Xen Orchestra seems like it scales up well (I haven’t used it before but is in contention to replace our existing system). Then there’s Openstack which scales up to data center sizes allowing you control over the whole infrastructure (networking, compute, storage, DNS, the list goes on) which seems like a lot of all your doing is trying to run some virtual images.
I’ve been using Ganeti for a couple years now with the standard XL toolstack without any real issues besides the initial configuration. I would NOT recommend this project (as well as the web manager) as it is old and not maintained well and I’m in the process of finding a better more state of the art solution.
Here’s a link to the Xen Orchestra site that references the open source toolstacks/management engines it’s compatible with: https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xenserver
Sorry for any typos or shit formatting, mobile is hard. Hope the information helps!
- Regarding Xen Orchestra: for home lab, you can use it from the sources with ALL features. See https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/from_the_sources.html -> no worries on this side, it's Open Source
- Never heard any issue with Ubuntu, but not sure what do you want to achieve here?
Well,I initially just seemed to dive in. XenServer was the most comfortable free option for me, (Windows desktop to run XenCenter GUI, some linux experience.. You know, "simple" things)
I have learned that a GREAT resource actually comes from the Administrator's guide and other docs located here: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenserver.html
If you plan to utilize PCI Passthrough (NOT for secondary GPUs, XenCenter GUI takes care of that), took a look here as this little guide helped me out, (it doesn't show this on that post, but just remember that the command lspci is needed to find the device.) I had to use this method to pass through a Dual-port NIC for my PfSense VM.
That is the only outside guide that I really had to use for learning that. Everything else ultimately is in the docs.
There are other tools that help with managing the server, a big one that just got partnered with Citrix, is Xen-Orchestra. This has some features that you can't "set and forget" normally with XenCenter, such as a scheduled backup, and File-level restoration, (and a bunch of other things but I really like the backup feature. hah)
XOSAN will bring support for Gluster :) The driver will be open source for thos who don't want the hyperconverged/turnkey solution!
https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-hyperconverged-with-xosan/
I would look for:
https://www.quadricsoftware.com/
Quadric's Alike supports Changed Block Tracking; I do not know anyone else that does it for XenServer
https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/features/backup & https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-quiesce-snapshots/
Xen Orchestra has a free full featured option
(edit: format)
We're using a mix of 1G and 10G. The pools are connected to 1G switches, with 10G links between pools. Yes, XenServer is free. Citrix Open Sourced it a few years ago. You can still get support contracts through Citrix, and there are a few features that you don't get in the free version, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. They aren't widely used features.
We haven't been running constant replication for all that long, but it seems to be working well so far. From what I understand, its just rsync under the hood, so it keeps up with our load just fine. They have some information up on it here: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/continuous_replication.html
I'll add that Xen also lets you do pretty much everything for free. I tried switching my environment to ESXi this weekend, and ran into so much difficulty with licensing.
Once you have Xen set up, make yourself a Xen Orchestra management appliance from source:
XenServer & XenOrchestra for management. XenServer is free and fully functional. XenOrchestra has a free version with some restrictions that are fine in a non enterprise environment - or you can build your own version from the sources that has all the features, but you can't update it automatically.
Cool :) Don't forget to try the new UI by adding "/v5" in the XOA URL (it will be by default when 5.1 is out).
If you need help, there is a live chat on https://xen-orchestra.com -> feel free, I'm here to help!
I agree that I would really like to see a Linux management application or an interface that is web based and OS agnostic for free but on the whole I find XenServer a really good feature rich solid open source Linux virtualisation project that just works. You get all the features you need and constantly released bug and feature updates. This version is based on CentOS 7 which is nice and includes some really nice new features, I especially like the CPU leveling.
By the way, OpenXenManager works fairly well for some things: https://github.com/OpenXenManager/openxenmanager and if you did want a web based interface there is always https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/
Hey :) Just to give you some news: we made a complete doc about XO. There is a dedicated backup category: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/backups.html
Since 4.3, we got a lot of new backup features, like Disaster Recovery (via VM streaming in XO). I think you'll like it :)
- You can install XAPI with modern Xen, but it's not easy (manual install/compilation of XAPI toolstack).
- XenServer is Open Source, and it has Xen+XAPI toolstack already built inside.
And finally, you can use Xen Orchestra on top, which is also fully Open Source and agent-less.
I'm no Proxmox expert, but give it a try. The manual install procedure for XO is here: https://github.com/vatesfr/xo/blob/master/doc/installation/manual_installation.md#manual-installation
If you have any problem, you can create a post in our forum: https://xen-orchestra.com/forum (if you already have a GitHub account, you can login with it).
Hi!
4 month ago it was around the 3.6
Since then, you got:
3.7: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-3-7-is-out-acls-in-early-access/
3.8: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-3-8/
3.9: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-3-9/
So, XO is now in a far better shape!
And 4.0 will come in May! Yes, the project got a really nice boost since the start of 2015, because the team has grown!
Hi! If you like XenServer, you'll probably test Xen Orchestra ( https://xen-orchestra.com/ ) which is a Web interface for it. XenCenter is good but only runs on Windows.
This project is Open Source (aGPLv3)
Does have a cost associated with it though.
Not that I have anything against proxmox, but I've never heard of it deployed in a business environment, so the experience won't exactly transfer over.