XCP-ng 7.5

Olivier Lambert -

We did it! XCP-ng 7.5 is now available to download. It's not just following XenServer 7.5 release, it also brings exclusive features and bug fixes.

For those who are in a hurry, see you in the Download section. Do not miss the upgrade instructions.

Teamwork

This release was only possible because of a large teamwork between companies and individuals. From testing to bug fixing, everyone contributed. We are really proud of this community involvement! This can be seen by the intense activity on XCP-ng forum and on the GitHub organization. A big thanks to everyone involved in this release!

Kickstarter news

For those who contributed to our Kickstarter campaign: most of the packages are already sent, except for some mugs and obviously USB keys (we wanted to wait for XCP-ng 7.5 release to put the content on the keys). If you think there is a problem with your shipping, please contact us!

Exclusive bug fixes

With XCP-ng, we didn't want to just make a clone of XenServer. We wanted to improve it. Note we pushed our fixes to Citrix to contribute to the global improvement of XenServer. Sharing works in both ways! Our ISO contains some major bug fixes that are still missing in XenServer:

We also had a major problem with a proprietary package that broke the Open Source build of XenServer: you can't suspend or migrate a VM without it. Fortunately, we managed to implement a solution ourselves, until Citrix re-integrates a switch to allow bypassing of this piece of software that's normally only needed for vGPU live migration.

Finally, we reported other issues (with a solution), for example on XSO-880 and  XSO-879.

New exclusive features

Those are features existing only in XCP-ng (or at least until Citrix decides to merge it).

ZFS support

It's still experimental, but your input is welcome. To enable ZFS support in your host, just follow our guide on XCP-ng wiki.

Feedback can be provided on the right forum topic.

Here is a previous article with some benchmarks on it: https://xcp-ng.org/2018/08/03/xcp-ng-with-zfs/

Ceph support

Brought by Roman Posudnevskiy, the biggest Ceph contributor in XenServer for years. We improved Ceph support in XCP-ng thanks to his Ceph experience and our good understanding on packaging. This is just an example on powerful collaboration between all the community members! Instructions to install it are available here.

Same as ZFS, please go ahead and test. Feedback welcome in the dedicated forum thread.

New features

Those are features coming from XenServer 7.5

Supported Pool Size increased to 64

XCP-ng is now able to support 64 hosts in a same pool. This new limitation, 4 times higher than the previous one allows a more efficient infrastructure management and a greater flexibility when using High Availability.

If you are using XOSAN, it's also the opportunity to step into the Hyperconvergence world and create a huge virtual SAN with no additional cost.

USB Passthrough

Passing through physical USB devices to a VM is now available in XCP-ng.

Networking SR-IOV

Use a single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) that allows a single PCI device to appear as multiple PCI devices on the physical system.

Pro support available

This release is also the start of Pro support availability. If you want to run it in production with Xen Orchestra's editor backing you, this is here: discover XCP-ng pro support.

The business model is simple: it's 100% based on a support model. And it's by host, not by socket, core or whatever.

We can also guide you in an upgrade process from XenServer to XCP-ng. Feel free to contact us on https://xcp-ng.com

Management and backup

If you want to learn more on how to manage and backup your VMs in XCP-ng, don't miss the next Xen Orchestra webinar on this topic. You can register to be notified on where it will be done (likely a YouTube live).

What's next

We are working on embedding soft-RAID1 support directly in the XCP-ng installer:

This is still experimental, so please refer to this thread and follow the instructions to download the dedicated test ISO.

Install or upgrade

Install instructions are unchanged since 7.4, and available in our download page. Upgrade is documented here.