If I had my choice, Prevent Migration is more understandable.

Disable Migration, while it means the same thing, doesn't naturally come out of the English language.

@olivierlambert I was able to sort out the issue, it has to do with licensing and the fact that we aren't licensed to with "Live Migration" for this ESXi host.

Essentially this inquiry is solved.

@TechGrips While I can understand the desire to use removable USB as a Backup Repo, I would highly discourage it.

Managing and rotating USB drives is a pain, if they go to sleep, it's a pain, if they fail it's a pain, if you forget to rotate your drives, it's a pain.

I personally can understand the desire to do so, it's cheap and relatively affective if you can deal with these risks, however so is just using any NFS or SMB share and then having a replication script that could write to your USB, which you could then rotate. Separating your XCP-ng hosts, XO, and your backups is of critical importance because if you have any sort of server room environmental issues or failure, you're risking loosing everything.

XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, while they do offer a ton of flexibility, there is obviously trades-offs to using less than ideal components, such as external USB drives as your primary backup repository.

If you really want to insist on using USB drives, you'll have to attach the drives to your host and then pass them through to your XO installation, which when you want to rotate those drives you'll have to update your Backup jobs within XO and confirm that your XO VM has the proper access to the drives. This seems like a lot of complexity for very little financial benefit.

Separately I think you're taking your own frustrations out on the community, because of a lack of understanding in the tooling that you testing in comparison to ESXi where you'd attach a USB drive directly, perform your backup, remove the disk and attach another.

I get that ESXi can make things "simple" but simple isn't always better.

HTH

The reason you wouldn't want to look at XO for this from a technical standpoint is because XO works at the hardware level of the hypervisor, dolling out resources to different VMs and creating backups.

You need to look at the content within a given VM and compare the file system difference from points A and B.

Only something that is operating within the file system would be able to readily tell you "Something has changed".

Odds are you have a user or several who are dumping files onto a share that they shouldn't be, or are replicating some cloud service to keep a copy on your server etc.

@flakpyro said in How to migrate XOA itself?:

@DustinB Are the any downsides to having two XOA instances pointing at the same pool? Since the config itself is stored at the pool level im guessing theres no downside?

IE: Priimary XOA running in core DC and secondary XOA running at your DR site. Is it just a matter of adding the pool on the secondary XOA and it downloads the existing config or did you need to do a full export / import?

If you import your configuration, each XO instance will think they should be running the backups as far as I've noticed. If I have two instances running with the same configuration, I simply disable the backup jobs on one of them.

The config file is just an XML that contains your existing instance. You can import it to any new XO instance and have the same exact configuration.

@yzgulec there really isn't any hard-fast rules to aligning CPU to vCPU. A Guest is going to need cores to operate no matter what.

If you're trying to min-max your CPU utilization for a given system, you might want to target the guest to use between 70-80% of it's vCPU all of the time.

This is all a part of system tuning and is always a shifting target, as CPU is shared among all VMs and DOM0.

As you increase the number of guests on a host, the CPU consumption will be increased, which means you may need to scale back on the vCPU a given VM has.

@stormi said in XSA-468: multiple Windows PV driver vulnerabilities - update now!:

Do others share this feeling and have this question after re-reading the whole announcement?

No it's pretty clear, update the drivers on everything as all versions are susceptible.

@olivierlambert I agree wholeheartedly with you on that. Keeping the system stock is best for support.

Separately, is there any planned work on officially integrating support for Uninterruptable Power Supplies and XCP-ng 8.3?

A question

• Have you clicked into the console screen before hitting F12?

You can disable all of the boot devices in the Advanced section of the VM, try disabling the HDD

Disable the Boot options if your system is making it past POST to quickly so you can get into the Guests BIOS.

@jasonnix said in A question for the creators of XO:

Hi @olivierlambert,
No, I'm not a bot. I asked it because I need your experiences. I want to make a panel for Xen.

So you know how to program with PHP and Ruby and not with Javascript, so the question is really "Why can't this be rewritten so I can help?"

@JCS-RVK You likely need to install the dependencies to use with VDDK.

This is a WIP from the vates team where you can find information regarding it here https://github.com/vatesfr/xen-orchestra/pull/8840

My guess, and I'm still sorting it out for my GH is that you likely need to run sudo apt install libnbd-bin nbdkit nbdkit-plugin-vddk on your XOCE installation, but that is just a guess at this time as the VDDK version number is also in flux (going from 9 to version 8 ) etc.

fbeauchamp opened this pull request in vatesfr/xen-orchestra

closed feat(V2V): use vddk and disk generator for import #8840

@ccesario There is a running topic regarding the 2TB limit and removing it with QCOW/2 format https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/10308/dedicated-thread-removing-the-2tib-limit-with-qcow2-volumes/156

I've not kept up with it as I don't have this issue, but this is very much a work in progress.

@Forza said in NVMe SSD not found when installing:

We have been using software raid1 for years on Intel hardware for industrial focused computers. However since Intel switched to VMD we started to get very odd problems like blue screens (windows) and spontaneous reboots and hard lockups where the raid volume wouldn't come back unless we did full power cycle. After some months we found a reproducer which we sent to our vendor, who in turn were able to reproduce it on different motherboards of different manufacturers with different chipsets supporting VMD. Until today we have not found a fix.

Yeah this doesn't sound any different from every fakeRAID that has ever existed... it's doing all of the work on the motherboard, writing little to disk and hoping for the best.

@olivierlambert said in NVMe SSD not found when installing:

@DustinB Last time I checked, VMD is a shitty half-baked soft/hard RAID.

@Forza said in NVMe SSD not found when installing:

@olivierlambert said in NVMe SSD not found when installing:

@DustinB Last time I checked, VMD is a shitting half-baked soft/hard RAID.

Indeed. The firmware hides pci devices behind this vmd thing. It is absolutely unstable and unfixable.

Good to know, will steer well clear of it.

@TeddyAstie said in NVMe SSD not found when installing:

Hello,

Make sure Intel VMD is disabled (this is the hardware RAID feature of Intel, and it doesn't currently work on XCP-ng; you probably don't need it unless you are looking to make a RAID). We found some modern platforms enabling by default (which also causes issues with Windows).

Is VMD actually hardware raid or is it some bastardization of Hardware Raid?

@kevdog a memtest is going to check the physical memory for any issues, if you're not seeing any other errors on other VMs I would lean more towards this VM having some kind of corruption issue.

A memtest won't hurt and it would help to eliminate a possible issue, it would definitely take some time to complete, which may not be an option if you have any sort of uptime requirements.

@AlbertK said in XCP-ng - XOA vs. XOCE:

@Danp ,

Is it possible to add the comparison of the XOCE together wit XO in this page?.
https://vates.tech/pricing-and-support/#features-matrix

XOCE is a term that I came up with when I originally started writing the deployment script that exists today.

It's stuck around. Vates uses the terms XOA and "XO from Sources" as their unique products. XOCE would be "you used a github script to deploy" (my github) XO.

XO from Sources is a completely manual process where you're following the documentation to deploy XO. This approach gets you the same thing that XOCE does, but takes longer to complete since you're finishing each step over SSH rather than running a single bash command on a Ubuntu/Debian VM.

@L1512191 Dan answered, but there are features of XOA that are only available from having a support agreement with Vates. If you don't need those features or can use other approaches for the things that you might need, then XOCE might be for you.

@L1512191 said in XCP-ng - XOA vs. XOCE:

Forked discussion from https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/96400

I read the readme of the XOCE installation script. Nice job @DustinB!

Can someone tell me about the limitations of XOCE, compared to XOA? I assume there are some, as XOCE "is not officially supported by the Vates team", but please correct me if I'm wrong.

XOCE is offered free of charge, support is offered from that community (also free of charge). It is not officially supported by Vates, as Vates is the business that has created XO and XCP-ng, they sell support, but you could also use XOA free which has limitations on its functionality.

XOCE is built from the source documentation and is unrestricted to what you can do, but support is from good will, and best effort rather than paid support of the Vates organization.

XOCE gives you a completely functional system that works to manage, backup and restore your VM's that is available from the source documentation. Features that are only available from XOA Hub, aren't available. This is because the Hub is tied to a license that you would get with your subscription from Vates.

Otherwise there aren't any "limitations" it's that XOCE literally has no way to get access to that particular feature.

@Piefje01 I'd say try to read the help docs of Vinchin but their website doesn't seem to be working properly... https://www.vinchin.com/vm-migration/xcp-ng-live-migration.html

You could use any V2V migration tool, I think StarWinds has a V2V tool that works too - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter

I can't speak to the validity of it though.