First XCP-ng release

News Mar 31, 2018

We said "the first XCP-ng release will be available in Q1". Guess what? We did it.

Mirrors:

A big thanks for people hosting mirrors!

Md5sum: ea2a9b90218537b546d1f399ae2ace95

What about pro support? A recurrent question from various companies is support related. Good news: in a near future, XCP-ng will be backed with professional support, based on the fully Open Source version, without any feature restrictions. We also aim to put XCP-ng in an Open Source foundation as soon as we can, to be certain to be available to everyone without limits.

A first test release

XCP-ng is based on XenServer 7.4. Remember this first release is a go for testing and gathering your feedback. There is still some stuff to improve, like:

including our RPM repos
doing more test (that's also up to you!)
improve compatibility (read more on a paragaph below)
doing a real build process

Keep that in mind before doing anything with production systems. This is only the first release and it means you can either test it or wait for more feedback.

It's possible that next improved release will require a full "upgrade" (ie like reinstall while saving your existing VMs on it, like a traditional XenServer upgrade). We can't know for sure right now.

What's in it?

With the ISO we provided:

You can install XCP-ng from scratch on your hardware
You can upgrade an existing XenServer to XCP-ng
You can enjoy ALL features without restrictions

Note: XenServer ISO is detecting XCP-ng install and should be able to "downgrade" it (ie: getting back to XenServer). However, this is not tested.

Compatibility

Please read this before installing it

Due to change in the product name (ie XCP-ng vs XenServer), some operations could fail:

migrating a VM from XenServer to XCP-ng will work, NOT the opposite for now
Recent version of XenCenter fails to connect (but XO works perfectly!)

If you want a good UI to manage your XCP-ng, you can deploy Xen Orchestra by just typing this inside your XCP-ng console:

# bash -c "$(curl -s http://xoa.io/deploy)"

This will deploy a VM with a web UI.

Note: Xen Orchestra is 100% compatible with XCP-ng. You can either deploy the free turnkey appliance or install it from the sources yourself. If you already use it, just add the host in Settings/server, like any other XenServer host:

Here is the host view:

Install procedure

It's very similar to XenServer install. First, download our ISO here.

Then, install from USB key, eg with dd if=XCP-ng_7.4.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=8M status=progress oflag=direct. You can also burn a real CD or use a Windows program to create bootable USB key from an ISO file.

Finally, it's pretty straightforward:

That's it!

Now it will boot:

And you're in:

What's next?

We'd like to improve compatibility, add a default repo for next updates/patches and obviously improve our build process (that wasn't merely a process for now, but more a pile of various manual stuff). The build process is vital to keep up the pace and then later including extra features!