Hi everyone,

I just installed this 8.2.1 a Dell R630 and the installer was very smooth.
We chose to make a new installation since the host was running XS 7.2 and we wanted a fresh install, with that came the opportunity to leverage EXT and thin provisioning which seems to work just as it should.

We're also mounting a NFS SR for VM disks which works fine as well. I'll have to wait and see, but hopefully the problem with /var/log/snmpd.log is resolved now and no more alerts regarding disk usage

We're using Veeam for our VMware platform and XOA for our XCP platform and I have to say I prefer XOA. Why may one ask?
Well it is dead simple, its not bloated, you have a ton of options when it comes to configuration, destination, scheduling and so on.

Veeam on the other hand is A LOT faster, we're using a 10G link to our backup site and we're seeing speeds over 7Gbit/s when backing up our VMware platform and I know this is something Vates is working hard on improving in XOA.
Veeam also has application aware backups which is a big deal when you're running MSSQL inside your VM's - I dont think there is any plans from Vates in supporting this and this might be a big deal for customers comming from the VMware and Veeam-side.

According to Microsoft you need to use their built in backup feature or a software that supports AD and VSS which will tell the VM OS that it is going to be backed up.
Unless you do this there might be corruption of the AD Databases according to Microsoft.

ALL THO we've been backing up our AD servers with XOA snapshots (Both normal backup and incremental) and had only 1 issue since we started using XOA in 2016.
Since that issue we also use a guest agent (From Ahsay CBS) that makes a Windows System State backup and Windows System Backup.

More info about that can be found here:

https://wiki.ahsay.com/doku.php?id=public:version_9:client:9447_system_state_backup_vs_system_backup

A great opportunity for anyone who is into xcp, xoa and opensource software to join a great company

@olivierlambert said in XCP-ng 8.2.1 (maintenance update) - ready for testing:

Thanks a lot @nikade for your feedback! (also I love your avatar!)

Yeah, I gotta have my suit on my tux

I wanted to inform that I've tried iSCSI with multipathing as well and it works fine.
So far everything we need in our general production-environment seems to be working as it should.

@blackliner said in Sdn controller and physical network:

@nikade How do you "pair" the XCP-ng SDN with your routing setup?

You cant/dont, you'll have to setup each private network on the vyos router and then have the vm private network routed through it manually.

For example if you have private network 1 with subnet 192.168.1.0/24 you'd have to add this network to the vyos router and assign 192.168.1.1/24 on the router.
Then set 192.168.1.1 as default gateway in your vm's which uses this network.

Then you'll setup ospf or bgp on the vyos router manually with your upstream border/core-router or firewall. If the subnet is a private subnet you'll need to setup NAT as well somewhere before it reaches internet to NAT traffic from 192.168.1.0/24.

@Greg_E said in What should i expect from VM migration performance from Xen-ng ?:

@nikade

I've spent a bunch of time trying to find some dark magic to making the VDI migration faster, so far nothing. My VM (memory) migration is fast enough that I'm not concerned right now. and don't have any testing to show for it.

Currently migrating the test VDI from storage1 to storage2 (again) and getting an average of 400/400mbps (lower case m and b). If I do three VDI at once, I can get over a gigbit and sometimes close to 2 gigabit.

It's either SMAPIv1 or it is a file "block" size issue, bigger blocks can get me benchmarks up to 600MBps to almost 700MBps (capital M and B) on my slow storage over a 10gbps network. Testing this with XCP-NG 8.3 release to see if anything changed from the Beta, so far all is the same. Also all testing done with thin provisioned file shares (SMB and NFS). If I could get half my maximum tests for the VDI migration, I'd be happy. In fact I'm extremely pleased that my storage can go as fast as it is showing, it's all old stuff on SATA.

I have a whole thread on this testing if you want to read more.

You can see the migrate which was 400/400 and then the benchmark across the ethernet interface of my Truenas, this example was migrate from SMB to NFS, and benchmark on the NFS. Settings for that NFS are in the thread mentioned and certainly my fastest non-real world performance to date.

That's impressive!
We're not seeing as high speeds are you are, we have 3 different storages, mostly doing NFS tho. We're still running 8.2.0 but I dont really think it matters as the issue is most likely tied to the SMAPIv1.

We also noted that it goes a bit faster when doing 3-4 VDI's in parallell, but the individual speed per migration is about the same.

@planedrop said in XO - Restore Health Check:

I can confirm this is the case for me too, not a huge deal, but would be kinda nice if it could keep track of the name.

Thanks for verifying, it is probably an easy fix for the vates ppl

Hi everyone,

Has anyone else tried the Restore Health Check-feature in XO to test their backups?
I've used it now in my lab a couple of times and it works great, but one thing that bugs me out is that the name of the tested VM is no longer dispalyed after the TEST is finished because it was removed:

Instead of listing the name of the VM it just says "VM not found!"

We're using XO from sources:

Xen Orchestra, commit 8b7e1
Master, commit 587da

@Dataslak said in After installing updates: 0 bytes free, Control domain memory = 0B:

@nikade @olivierlambert @stormi @Danp @yann

Just wanted to say to you all:

Thank you for your contributions and kind helpful assistance which has helped me through this crisis.

I would have been in deep trouble without you. I respect your expertise, and appreciate deeply that you are working so hard to help us dumb users. I have learned a lot, and hope one day to become skilled enough to at least help other new users on this forum.

Best wishes
Aslak

Happy everything worked out, this is what this community is all about.
I've gotten a lot of help and given some too, it's all about helping out with the things that you can.
With time you'll be able to help out more and more and more

@irtaza9 it scans all the VDI's on the SR to see if something has changed, if there's a need for coalesce and so on.
I dont think it will be a big issue if you increase the auto-scan-interval value to lets say 5 minutes (300 seconds), but do remember, that everything regarding the VDI's on the SR will take up to 5 minutes to update, as well as triggering coalesce after removing snapshots.

@acebmxer It's not pretty, but its failsafe. The proceedure looked like this in our case:

1. Disable HA in the "old pool"
2. Put a host in the "old pool" into maintenance mode
3. Reinstall that host and connect it to XOA and then patch it
4. Create a "new pool" from that host
5. Create a new LUN or NFS share in the SAN for "new pool" and attach it to "new pool"
6. Live migrate VM's over from "old pool" to "new pool"
7. Once you've freed up another host you repeate step 2 and 3 and then join that host to "new pool". It is important that you patch it before joining it to the pool, that is done by going to Settings -> Servers in XOA and connect to it manually.

And then just continue untill you're done. Live migration is pretty reliable now days, so this works pretty good and since we had 10G network its not taking as long as it used to do with 1G network.
We did this after a major incident on our primary production site where 2 out of 4 hosts in a pool "suddenly" lost their NIC's after updating them. Since then we never updated the pools again. Standalone hosts are fine tho, they never did this.

Luckily we had 2 other pools where we could migrate the VM's to, but we couldn't realy trust the updating after that.

@acebmxer did it ever finish? Did it work or was the vm shutdown'd?

This is a classic issue with XAPI, once you have hosts in a pool and the slave cannot reach the master it will go crazy. Never seen this issue with standalone hosts tho.

We usually had this issue when upgrading xenserver, so we simply stopped doing that and then never had any issues. We went to "new" versions by simply standing up a new pool and migrate all the vm's over to it

I have no clue, I usually back it up with XO, its the one called "XO config & pool metadata backup" and only had to restore it once.

@vague said in Bitten by XSA-474:

starting up database engine D:2a59ed50ccb5 failed with exception Xmlm.Error(2:317874, "malformed character stream")

My guess is that your xapi database has been corrupted, if you dont have a backup this will be a rough one.

To add some content I'll summarize what you wrote on IRC:

1. You got an error, it was not resolved.
2. You then decided to start upgrading your xcp installation
3. Now the database is corrupt, not sure it it was already or if it happend in step 2.

Cool, thnx for the info!

@marcoi said in How to Setup IPMI in XO:

curious how does this work, dont you need to put in a username and password/IP address for ipmi details. I havent looked at docs or tried this out, just wondering. I think on ESXI i had to setup the ipmi with such details before i could issue power on etc.

I am also curious, since I asume authentication would be required before you're allowed to read or write data from iDRAC, we have a read-only "statsuser" to poll from iDRAC with Observium.

But maybe there is some kind of "special" integrated pass-through authentication done since the ipmitool is being executed from the same host.

@florent no im using EXT local SR. I tried downloading a VMDK and it worked fine, so not really sure whats going on.

I also tried from an esxi 8 host within the same network, same thing, I could also download a vmdk from it.

I just migrated from 2x vmware vsan hosts and 1x vmware standalone to xcp-ng in my lab and every migration resulted in a stop of the source vm. It's not a big deal for me in our lab, but I had major issues with some VM's never "finished" the migration.

Xen Orchestra, commit b89c2
Master, commit b89c2

I noticed that after the task has timed out, the VM that was migrated is often able to start, even tho it was not "finished". Is this expected?