I decided to burn my lab down because of some trouble and wanted to start fresh to isolate any problems I may have created in the past. Wiped the disks, built a new NFS share ready for work, installed the XCP-ng OS and configured networking for the management interface on the local machines, all normal stuff. Went back to my desk and logged into XO Lite on each machine, using console --> xsconsole I was able to get all the hosts into a pool, and add an ISO and NFS SR, all seemed to work.

Went to the New VM to create a simple Debian vm on which I intended to host XO-CE from sources. Typed the info in, chose the Debian image from my ISO SR, the rest of the config as normal. Uncheck the boot after creation box, and create.

Click on the VM to bring the console up, then click power on... UEFI loader comes up, and ... Can't find the boot disk. Tried another iso that I knew was capable of EFI boot, same.

Realized I was trying to start in EFI, made a new one in BIOS mode, this one worked but now my screen shots are messed up so I'll probably have to go through and delete stuff with a different XO and go back to grabbing images of the process to write up "for the next guy".

Other than this small issue, it's working and doing it all from XO Lite. Yes still a bunch of missing features, but I know you are working on this. I just wanted to try things this way on this fresh build and see what I could get done from local console and XO Lite.

nikade

BTW, the ram increase made zero difference in the VDI migration times.

I may still change the ram for each host in production, but I only have like 12 VMs right now and probably not many more to create in my little system. Might be useful if I ever get down to a single host because of a catastrophe. Currently running what it chose for default at 7.41 MiB, roughly doubled that in my lab to see what might happen.

Just got my VMware lab started so all this other stuff is going to back burner for a while. I will say I like the basic ESXi interface that they give you, I can see why smaller systems may not bother buying VCenter. I hope XO-lite gives us the same amount of function when it gets done (or more).

olivierlambert

I was looking for a way to mark this solved, can't find it.

I haven't moved things, but after migrating my big lab to my mini-lab, I'm confident that the warm migration is the way to go. It was fast and seamless as long as you have the right network adapters set up. I had to fool with one of my networks to make a VM function, but that was certainly something I overlooked while setting up the mini-lab. A little testing before moving the VMs should make this go easily if using the old servers is the option for this project.

Having what is essentially XCP-NG Center from a browser would be nice, no more need to install something on a Windows machine just to get some basic stuff set up until you get a full XOA instance running. Yes I know you can just grab the demo with a single command, but sometimes you want to configure a few things first.

olivierlambert

Documentation is the first thing to get pushed to the back burner, same in my area, same in my larger IT department. Never enough time to document things correctly.

I need to get going with Netbox and see if I can make this speed up what I want to document.

trobertson

Ummm... Your documentation sure makes a lot of us jealous!

Was that just a layout program like draw.io, or are you using something like Netbox for that work?

I'm starting on GLPI to handle more than just flow paths going forward, need to track serial numbers, date of purchase, maybe installed software as I go forward. A project for the summer.

So there might be two other things to look into if you get bored.

manilx

It is not cheaper, but it draws about half the power when idle. When doing work the power still gets up there, they are 60-90 watt computers, which is still less than the 300 watt capable HP servers at full go.

If you really stress your lab a lot, real servers are a win as they will draw less power for more performance, but if yours is like mine and it idles a lot, cutting the power is nice. I'm about 200 watts at idle with the above, and that's two labs worth. I was 400 with the single old lab system.

Mounts are cheap book ends, drilled and screwed to that specific shelf, and drilled for short m4 thumbscrews to get into the VESA mount on the t740.

If anyone reading this wants to duplicate, and they see HP T755 cheap enough, I recommend these because it has 6 cores / 12 threads over the t740 with 4 cores / 8 threads. Both are DDR4 sodimm and top out at 64GB. Both have a PCI 3.0 x8 (x16 slot) that takes half height cards. And if the BIOS is locked, you can write over them with a programmer and enter the data needed to function (see badcaps forum for my guide).

Here is mine

HP DL360e Gen 8 for Truenas, 96GB of RAM, more processors than it needs, and 8x500 drives, NFS share for the VMs

3x HP DL360p gen 8 for XCP-NG with 128GB of RAM and 20c40t worth of processors.

10gbps networking to a Mikrotik switch, also an old Cisco 2960s for a second gigabit network (with POE+)

There is also a cheap GPS/GNSS NTP clock at the top of the rack, just too far to show these other items.

I like the spinning lights on the drives, just wish it was a little faster.

olivierlambert

Thank you, that's what I thought and why I was willing to buy the lower end CPU in order to get the project through. At the time going for the larger Gold would have doubled the cost of each server.

gskger

Do I need to change each host or just the pool coordinator? Since my lab was recently rebuilt, I might as well get on the testing branch.

olivierlambert

Documentation is the first thing to get pushed to the back burner, same in my area, same in my larger IT department. Never enough time to document things correctly.

I need to get going with Netbox and see if I can make this speed up what I want to document.

andriy.sultanov

The move is more about spending yet more personal money for something that is primarily used for learning what I need to know for work (a rack, UPS, and some odds and ends at $800). Or half of it is, half of it is a VMware system and that's to let me learn what I need to leave this job and find one that pays more. And then move that work to something easier to use that costs less. Still amazed at how many places just took the price increase and are still not making plans to move to something else, even if they are cutting core counts in half to save half of that new money. But I'm also seeing that the general trend in IT around where I live is to get into a Silo, and never ever take on another task to fill a need. This way you never want to move laterally to other products, just keep doing the same things the same ways until management gets tired of hearing "we can't do that" and fires everyone to replace them with an MSP (or other contractor).

So for the off topic rant, feeling salty again today.

andriy.sultanov

If still needed, I can probably get you the rrd2csv next week, I need to unrack my system and move it to a new mobile rack. A large expense that I'm not happy to have to do, but now needed going forward (it's a work thing, where I prototype workflows for my production system)

trobertson

Ummm... Your documentation sure makes a lot of us jealous!

Was that just a layout program like draw.io, or are you using something like Netbox for that work?

I'm starting on GLPI to handle more than just flow paths going forward, need to track serial numbers, date of purchase, maybe installed software as I go forward. A project for the summer.

So there might be two other things to look into if you get bored.

stormi

My master host hung on reboot, after about 10 minutes I forced the power off, and then back on. Host is HP T740 Thinclient with AMD v1756b processor, 64GB of DDR4 SODIMM, Intel dual x520 PCIe card, and an Intel i226-v in the a+e slot, plus the onboard Realtek NIC, BIOS at 1.20 which I think is still current for this model. All three hosts are identical with possible exception of x520 card revisions, host 3 might have an older revision (donations accepted for x710 based cards )

Otherwise everything went as planned, all three are updated and all three needed to have the toolstack restarted to see the stats. I only have 2 small Linux VMs on this system right now, and both of them started fine.

There were no stats in XO-Lite either, I was doing the second and third hosts from XO-Lite to see if XO was getting mad. The second and third rebooted without issue and something I'll look into with the next update, the delay on master could have been the VMs trying to auto start where I remembered to turn that off for the other two hosts.

Danp

Off topic, XO-Lite is really moving along. I have screen captures for setting up a system from install using XO-Lite. This gets me up to installing Debian for an XO from sources VM to go farther. Keep up the good work!

flakpyro

Not going to be able to test this, my little mini-lab is having a very hard time with passthrough, to the point where the host won't boot. Tried this on my backup host (for backup DR testing) and finally got it back after the last couple of hours fooling with turning passthrough on and then back off. Sorry.

flakpyro

I'm guessing it is something to do with the T1000. I've had so flakyness with them in our workstations. You don't have an older K620 or something do you? I'm also wondering if this might be a case for an Intel ARC GPU, they weren't out when I did my last workstation refresh or I'd probably be using them with Creative Cloud applications.

Also can you try change the Management Agent Service from auto-start to delayed auto-start? Server 2025 has been a bit odd for me for a while, and that was back running on Intel hosts (though they are old CPUs).

I'll see if I can get a VM up this afternoon, but I'm on AMD with the iGPU so not sure it even supports the acceleration that you need out of the T1000 for the camera recorders. I need to go through and configure each host to pass through the GPU, audio, and maybe some USB and then reboot. But if it works, it might make a nice Handbrake transcoding VM for me, dump files in, get back to work while it does it's thing.

flakpyro

Which version of Server are you running? UEFI, vTPM, Secureboot?

I don't have an Windows Server on my lab right now, but I can give it a quick check and see. Not sure I can pass through the iGPU in my lab though, and production doesn't have a GPU (real servers with ASpeed BMC).

For some reason, my hosts stop displaying the stats after about 2 days. I did a rolling pool reboot 2 days ago, then restarted the toolstack on each of 3 hosts (my pool) to restore the stats. As of right now, only 1 of the hosts has the stats working still.

The fourth identical "server" of the same hardware is just running the regular release cycle, it still has stats after many days/weeks being up, so not hardware related.

I also wanted to ask, how often updates come out for this "branch" and is there anything special we need to do to get them installed?