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.

@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

@planedrop said in Veeam and XCP-ng:

@jasonnix I've done extensive testing with this myself, first and foremost, Veeam is the one that would have to support it, not vice versa.

Second, it would be best to use XO for the backups, it's much more fluid and is fully integrated, I've been doing this for some time and it's been excellent in multiple production setups.

I also have tested using Veeam via agents within the VMs themselves (this was just for test purposes, I'd still not really recommend it) and it worked exactly as expected.

Using XO for this is still better though, it's generally faster, easier to setup, more reliable, and much faster and easier to recover from backups.

If you are considering this as a comparison to VMware, it's worth noting that it's not really a positive thing that VMware requires you buy a separate product entirely in order to handle backups.

Well said, I totally agree.

@BHellman said in Let's Test the HA:

Disclaimer: I work for LINBIT, makers of DRBD and LINSTOR the tech behind XOSTOR.

We can do highly available iscsi targets, we even have guides on our website that take you step by step to do it. These would be outside of XCP-NG, but would serve the same purpose.

If there is any interest from Vates to integrate DRBD/HA into XCP-NG, we're always open to discussions.

Sounds interesting for pretty much everyone comming from VMware vSAN running SQL Server in a failover-cluster if im allowed to jump the gun

@fred974 said in How to pass MAC address to pfSense VM:

@nikade do you use 2 IP subnet? 1x for xcp-ng management + ssh and another extra that you use for the VMs or is it all 1 single subnet? Also did you requested separate MAC on Hetzner backend or left it as is?

@nikade said in How to pass MAC address to pfSense VM:

We then enabled forwarding on the xcp-ng host and setup the first usable IP as "local" subnet

How did you achieve this? Thank you very much in advance. I really appreciate the feedback..

1 IPv4 on the dom0, the one that came with the server. Then we ordered a /29 IPv4 subnet which is routed to the dom0 IPv4 address.
You then need to setup IPv4 forwarding on the dom0 by editing the sysctl and then setup the 1st usable IPv4 from the /29 IPv4 subnet on an internal interface.

I just created a dummy vlan interface and put it there and that worked fine.

Used Hetzner many times with xcp-ng and pfsense, we ordered a subnet which was routed to the xcp-ng host.
We then enabled forwarding on the xcp-ng host and setup the first usable IP as "local" subnet and then we were able to use the rest of the IP's on our VM's using that first IP as default gateway.

@planedrop said in Backup / Migration Performance:

@KPS Regarding the 2TiB limitation, it'll definitely be nice when we have SMAPIv3 so we can go over this, but it's worth noting that IMO no VMs should be larger than this anyway. Generally speaking if you need that kind of space it'd be better to just use a NAS/iSCSI setup. Something like TrueNAS can delivery that at high speed, and then handle it's own backups and replication of it.

I know most probably already know this, and all environments are different (I manage one that requires a 7TiB local disk, at least for the time being, plan is to migrate it to a NAS once the software vendor supports it), but it's worth noting anytime I see the 2TiB limit come up, ideally it should be architected around so the VMs are nimble.

I do something similar w/ a pretty massive SMB share and TrueNAS can back this up at whatever speed the WAN can handle, in my case 2 gigabits and it'll maintain that 2 gigabit upload for 8+ hours without slowing down. (and I'm confident even 10 gigabit would be possible with this box)

We have 1 exception and that is for Windows file servers which is backing our DFS.
Except from those we dont allow VM's larger than 1Tb and if they're that big we do not back them up because it usually breaks and cause all kinds of problems.

@Greg_E yeah I can imagine, I dont think the ram does much except gives you some "margins" under some heavier load. With 12 VM's I wouldn't bother increasing it from the default values

Yea the mgmt interface in ESXi is nice, I think the standalone interface is almost better than vCenter. Im pretty sure XO Lite will be able to do more when it is done, for example you'll be able to manage a small pool with it.

Googling the error "supervisor read data page not present" gives a lot of hints towards bad memory, are you using ECC or non ECC?

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

@nikade

I'm doing upgrades on both XCP-NG and Truenas, when they are done I have 4 small VMs that I'm going to fire up at the same time and see what I can see. I might be able to hit 2gbps reads while all 4 are booting.

I have one last thing to try in my speed testing, going to see if increasing the RAM for each host makes a difference. Probably not since each already has a decent amount (defaults go up when you pass a certain amount of available). I read somewhere that going up to 16GB for each host might help, with my lab being so lightly used, I might try going up to 32GB for fun. I have lots of slots in my production system where I can add RAM if this helps on lab, the lab machines are full.

We usually set our busy hosts to 16Gb for the dom0 - It does make a stability difference in our case (We could have 30-40 running VM's per host) especially when there is a bit of load inside the VM's.
Normal hosts gets 4-8Gb ram depending on the total amount of ram in the host, 4Gb on the ones with 32Gb and then 6Gb for 64Gb and 8Gb and upwards for the ones with +128Gb.

@nikade they have always been created using the "other" template.
The original VM's had 1 vCPU and 2 GB preset on the template. Aside from the values changed initially, I didn't made changes to the memory/resources.
NIC: 2 NIC's (one for WAN another for LAN). Initially they always have the "Realtek" driver, so all I did on one test was changing that to Intel e1000. But there was no change to the outcome.

Hi,

Can you go to the "Advanced" tab of the VM and show the memory settings?
I want to make sure you're not using dynamic memory since it is really unstable in Xen.

What happends if you create a new VM with the template "other" and attempt to make a clean installation? Do you get the same error?

Also, what kind of configuration have to given the machine? For example NIC? RAM? Dynamic RAM or static?

@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.

@tuxpowered said in Rolling Pool Update - host took too long to restart:

@nikade Both clusters have shared storage. Kind of a pre-req to have a cluster
Yes both systems were on line and working well. One is TrueNas SCALE and the other is a Qnap. Both massively over kill systems.

Yea I was hoping that you were using shared storage, but i've actually seen ppl using clusters/pools without shared storage so I felt I had to ask