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.

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.

@stormi said in Nested Virtualization of Windows Hyper-V on XCP-ng:

Actually, Xen never officially supported Nested Virtualization. It was experimental, and broke when other needed changes were made to Xen. Now there's work to be done to make it fully supported, and this won't happen before the final release of XCP-ng 8.3. This will be documented in the release notes.

This is also an issue for us internally as we create a lot of virtual pools for our tests.

I read through a lot of the earlier posts and finally started scrolling to find this, which is the answer I was looking for. Why do I care? There is a Microsoft evaluation learning lab for things like Intune that runs in Hyper-V, basically a bunch of VHD (x) that get spawned as needed. Applications I need to teach myself. Running XCP-NG 8.3 current updates for this lab.

If it doesn't happen, then I'll just need to throw an eval version of Windows Server on something else like an HP T740 to run these labs, not the biggest issue for me.

Link for the labs if anyone is curious (free with an email registration like all the evals):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-mem-evaluation-lab-kit

I'd think direct Docker support would be a higher priority than nested virtualization with a focus on Hyper-V. But that's just me.

@olivierlambert

It is looking good, and like many people I am eagerly awaiting the roll out of the complete XO-Lite. But we need to remember that there are other ways to get your system up and going. You can grab the official XOA right from the XO-Lite pages, you can command line from a host and download XOA or one of the XO from sources. You can also take a completely separate Linux computer, in my case this is an old HP T630, install Debian, and build the sources on it.

No matter how you build your system, and whether you are paying for XO or using sources, I advocate to having at least one separate computer that has XO from sources running. Could be a laptop with Windows WSL, could be just a "terminal" in your rack room. Some cheap little computer that has Debian with a desktop for a few tools like web browser, and XO from sources that you can hit from the loop back or from a computer out of the room. There are times when having that local computer up to monitor things is really handy, especially if your XOA is crashed for some odd reason (host crash, etc.)

Now the above may change once they finish XO-Lite because the basic functions we need will again be present, but until then, there are ways to get going. XCP-NG Center had a lot of good stuff in it, but after teaching myself what I needed to do with XOA or XO-CE (sources), I don't really miss it. But set up from zero will be much easier with a completed XO-Lite, or at least can be different.

@dinhngtu

I haven't had time to install anything else on this VM, I'll have to think about other roles or features that I might want to try to see if additional services will cause additional problems. WDS might be a good one since it opens up a few different services, but really only good for Win10 stuff these days.

I could install the Shoutcast server (as a service), but not sure if it plays nice with AD DS, would be simple enough to point a stream at it and play the audio locally once it is set up.

Do you think Zabbix agent would trigger it? I could get that going pretty quick and use it to test things with Zabbix while doing it.

@Greg_E

Also I should say that I've rebooted many times and still OK, going to leave it baking while I get on to other things.

@Chemikant784

Since it doesn't seem to hurt anything, maybe it should get pushed up the chain to Xenserver and have them just change the MA installer to make this delayed start. But for now maybe this needs to be a note in the documentation that the user may need to change to delayed start for Windows 2025 running any parts of AD. If there are clearer images needed, let us know and one of us will grab some. Fell free to use my images in this thread in the official documentation if desired/needed. Should probably work up a few showing what this looks like from "normal" server view (no GUI), because as we know (people keep telling me) real admins don't use a GUI!
(aside, if that's true, why does Xen Orchestra exist??? Why does vCenter??? Why does Prism??? )

Also keep an eye on your server 2022, you never know when Microsoft will push a "fix" for something in AD and break the MA on currently working systems. We all know they have a habit of doing things like this. But I have a feeling it is the functional level of 2025 that is breaking this, something that should probably be tested but I don't have the time right now to delete it and set it back up at functional level 2016 and see what happens.

Has the kernel changed to a newer version, or still 4.xx.xx?

@olivierlambert

Which one, powershell or WAC. They are kind of one in the same when you look at how WAC makes the calls to do the work, there's a button to reveal the powershell behind the button clicks so you might be able to get both at once.

But WAC draws nice graphs and gives us a GUI to get the work done. Yes I know, real Admins don't use GUI. Whatever, AI will eat our jobs anyway, just trying to stick it out another 9 years at this point.

When I get time, I'll still probably take a swing at this task for WAC, because to me this would be valuable. Big learning curve though.

Now if MS would finally add Group Policy to WAC and fix some of the DHCP and DNS features that are still in preview...

@Greg_E

Ok, this was again not as straight forward as we might like. System as follows:

XCP-NG 8.3 (current)
vTPM, vUEFI, vSecureboot
NFS share
Management Agent 9.4
Server 2025 with November 2024 cumulative update applied (not important)
AD DS, DNS, DHCP installed and configured

After several reboots I was still getting the problem:

Thinking a little more, I decided to switch from Automatic to Automatic (Delayed Start)

The delayed start seems to have fixed the issue for me:

I've had this issue before with other services, we handle audio and video devices which have some demanding start routines so I should have thought of this earlier. Simply changing to delayed start lets another necessary service start which then allows the MA to start.

Also, the horrible lagging I mentioned earlier was from a Truenas issue that I didn't know about until a couple days ago, patch your Electric Eel if you haven't done this yet. It's still a little laggy, but not like it was when I mentioned the problem before. All work so far has been through the XO console which is running on an old HP T630 which is pretty slow.

Going to monitor this for a while before I dig too deeply into setting this up, it's my second physical network on my lab which is also the second physical network on my VMware system, I'm sure I'll need to do more configuration than just DNS and DHCP down the road. I'll probably form a trust with the first network AD DS, just to give that some practice and see what 2025 might bring. Eventually I'll need to upgrade my production network to 2025, so I'm justifying the time spent in research for the future, I'm already Windows 11 for all my clients, so Server 2025 should play more nicely and might bring some features back that they removed from 2022 (some GPO to start).

Didn't know where to put this, so here it is.

Has anyone developed any Windows Admin Center (WAC) extensions to manage and monitor XCP-NG? Big learning curve for me, but this might be a worthwhile investment in my time sometime soon. Just wondering if anyone else has fooled with this in the past?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/extend/developing-extensions

While this is "for windows" it can do a lot of other things like talk to your iDrac and iLO. Mostly I use WAC for some simple Windows tasks, but it would be nice to have a little XCP-NG/XO control while I'm in there. Since I haven't gone down this path yet, I'm assuming that I can have WAC make some API calls similar to how XO makes those calls. Just a theory but thought I would ask and maybe get people thinking about yet another way to manage our systems.

@dinhngtu

Thanks, I'll have to give this a try when I get some time, I can set it up on the gigabit network on my lab. Might even do this today because it's a task I can do while getting interrupted.

@Chemikant784

I noticed the installer when I was trying to update from the 9.3.3 to 9.4 agent, didn't know about schedulers being locked up.