XCP-ng 8.1 - Beta

Release Jan 28, 2020

XCP-ng 8.1 is available for beta testing. Full announcement is on the forum, Feedback, suggestions and discussion are welcome in this dedicated forum thread.

⚠ : Remember, this is a beta version. Do not use it in a production environment!

How to upgrade

XCP-ng 8.1 is a minor upgrade, which means you can use the yum upgrade method OR download the ISO file.

Download files are available here:

Standard ISO: http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/isos/8.1/xcp-ng-8.1.0-beta.iso
Net-install ISO: http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/isos/8.1/xcp-ng-8.1.0-beta-netinstall.iso
SHA256SUMS: http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/isos/8.1/SHA256SUMS
Signatures of the sums: http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/isos/8.1/SHA256SUMS.asc

If you want a more complete "How to Upgrade" guide, use our documentation

What's new in XCP-ng 8.1

XCP-ng 8.1 is based on the latest Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 release. The CentOS version (7.5) and the kernel version (4.19) are still the same.

New version of Xen Hypervisor

The Xen version in XCP-ng 8.1 is now Xen 4.13

UEFI support

UEFI support in XCP-ng 8.1 is not experimental anymore.

⚠ Support for Secure Boot is not included because it relies on Proprietary packages. We're currently investigating ways to deliver a FOSS implementation of this feature.

Improved performance for VM imports and exports

Thanks to the use of a new hash algorithm, VM imports and exports will benefit from improved performance when using the XVA format.

Ext4 filesystem is the new default ext type

For new local storage repositories using the EXT filesystem, it now defaults to ext4. The transition from our experimental ext4 storage driver is not automatic so you still need the sm-additional-drivers package if you have such a local storage repository. We will try to provide an automated conversion from the ext4 experimental driver to the ext driver for the RC (release candidate) release of XCP-ng. If we can't, we'll document the transition.

Support added

Support for AMD EPYC 7xx2(P) processors added

Deprecated features

Support for PV guests is now deprecated - templates for creating PV guests have been removed.

While existing PV guests will still run, it is advised to convert them to HVM guests.

Dynamic Memory Control (DMC) is deprecated and will be removed in the future.
VSS and quiesced snapshot support is removed

For backups, we are working on a RAM backup feature in order to replace quiesce snapshot in some situations (Windows DB, Active Directory backup...).

XFS and ZFS support

Support for XFS in local storage repositories is still available through the sm-additional-drivers package. ZFS is still available as an additional package and updated to 0.8.2. We may update to 0.8.3 for the RC release of XCP-ng.