XCP-ng new install features

News Sep 21, 2018

A new XCP-ng 7.5 ISO is available for download (2 in fact!) with new exciting features: software RAID support and netinstall. See you in the download section to grab them.

Please note that it’s only an updated installer. No need to upgrade an existing XCP-ng 7.5 with it. For regular updates see our documentation.

Software RAID support

Software RAID is now supported during XCP-ng install. Behind the scenes, it uses mdadm, which is the default software RAID system in Linux. It's well supported and very mature. We only exposed RAID1, because for a root partition, this is the most widespread use case. And the safest one too!

Enabling RAID is pretty easy, when you select the disk to install the XCP-ng system, click on the "Software RAID" button:

Then, you can select which disk will be in the RAID1 array (use spacebar to select a disk):

Then, create it!

Then, it's like a normal install:

Now, if one of the system disks fails, your XCP-ng will continue to work. To administer it, just use the usual mdadm commands, eg cat /proc/mdstat to display the current RAID status. More documentation on mdadm can be found here.

Net install ISO

We are also providing a Net Install ISO: it's only 100MiB!

The only visible difference using the installer: you won't have a "local source" (ISO) to download the package, but 2 choices:

If you select HTTP, we already pre-filled the option with the URL of our repo so you just have to click on "Ok":

And that's it!

Your own repo

You can use your own HTTP repo: just check that you have the same content that we have on our public repo.

Do you want to offer an official mirror? We'll work together to get it setup: this way, for the next release, we'll have a list of various mirrors all around the world.

What's next?

Interested in testing XCP-ng 7.6? A beta will be available soon here.

Tags

Olivier Lambert

Vates CEO & co-founder, Xen Orchestra and XCP-ng project creator. Enthusiast entrepreneur and Open Source advocate. A very happy Finnish Lapphund owner.