XCP-ng 8.0 - Release Candidate

Release Jul 1, 2019

The Release Candidate for XCP-ng 8.0 is available. You can now download and test it in your lab.

⚠ Even if the RC is expected to be stable enough for production environments, you should still use it with caution and wait for the final release.

This is the first release with close to 100% packages rebuilt in our own infrastructure, which is now based on Koji. Getting here was a long path and represents a big step forward for us, despite the fact that it currently changes nothing for users. You can learn more about it on our wiki.

How to upgrade

Since XCP-ng 8.0 will be a major release, there will be no support for upgrading using yum only.

The main reasons for that are:

  • New kernel: The installer runs on the same kernel as XCP-ng 8.0, so booting the  installer ISO is a good way to make sure your hardware is still recognized by the new kernel.
  • The yum-style upgrade does not offer backing-up your system at this stage, so it's too risky for a major upgrade.

You need to follow the steps available in our Upgrade Howto wiki.

All ISO are available right here:

If you don't have the ability to boot from an ISO, you can still use the remote upgrade alternate method

Feedback

If you are wondering what to test, the answer is: Everything and anything!

You can take a look at our recommended list of tests to join the community effort.

Report any issues or suggestions in the dedicated thread on the forum.

What's new in XCP-ng 8.0?

XCP-ng 8.0 is based on Citrix Hypervisor 8.0 so you can expect all the Open Source components to be part of the XCP-ng 8.0 RC as well.

Kernel and Xen Updates

  • XCP-ng 8.0 comes with a brand new Kernel (4.19), along with updated CentOS packages (from 7.2 to 7.5).
  • The Xen core is now Xen 4.11

Thanks to the updated kernel, XCP-ng 8.0 is now able to support more hardware. You can consult the Citrix Hardware Compatibility List as a reference.

However, some older hardware is not supported anymore. They are still expected to work, but security cannot be guaranteed for those, especially against side-channel attacks on legacy Intel CPUs.

UEFI support for guests

This feature is still experimental, use with caution

UEFI guests are now supported in XCP-ng.

Xen Orchestra quick deploy

It's now possible to deploy Xen Orchestra directly from the host welcome page in a very easy way.

We are very excited to hear your feedback about this!

completely rewritten emu-manager

We have rewritten the infamous emu-manager entirely in C. So far we have very good results with it.

We are especially looking for live migration tests to stress this component a lot before the final release!

MDS attack mitigation

This release includes the latest patches to mitigate the most recent intel vulnerabilities.

Mirrors and net-install

You can now offer mirrors and yum now pulls from them, depending on your geographical location.

As we are now delegating downloads to mirrors, we have improved the security checks when you are downloading packages. The `net-install` installer now checks the signature of the downloaded RPMs against our GPG key.

Experimental packages

  • ext4 and xfs support for local SRs is still considered experimental, although no one has reported any issues yet. You still need to install an additional package for it to work: yum install sm-additional-drivers.
  • ZFS packages are now available in the main repositories, so they can be installed with a simple yum install zfs.  They've also been updated to version 0.8.1 (as of 2019-06-18) which removes the limitations we had with the previous version in XCP-ng 7.6.  So far it has been reported to work very well! By the way, Xen Orchestra now has support for adding ZFS storage repositories.
  • No more modified qemu-dp for Ceph support, due to a stalled issue in 7.6 (patches need to be updated). However the newer kernel brings better support for Ceph and there's some documentation in the wiki.
  • Alternate kernel: none are available yet for 8.0, but it's likely that we'll provide one later.

What's new since the beta?

  • We added a new bash prompt and XSConsole colors to fit the official XCP-ng graphic design theme.
  • cryptsetup, htop, iftop and yum-utils are now installed by default in dom0
  • XAPI now automatically opens the VxLAN default port when an SDN controller is started. This is useful for the new pool-wide private networks feature from Xen Orchestra.
  • xcp-emu-manager bug fixes
  • XAPI plugin: ZFS pool detection for ZFS SR creation from XO
  • XAPI plugin: HyperThreading detection
  • Updated linux guest tools: fixed CoreOS support and backported SLES 15 SP1 support from upstream
  • The net-install ISO now points to the appropriate online repository for installing XCP-ng 8.0.0

Tags

Marc Pezin

CMO at Vates since 2017, I have been at the forefront of shaping and advancing the communication strategies and business development initiatives for Vates Virtualization Management Stack.

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