@poddingue there is a notion of appliance too (group of VMs) https://docs.xcp-ng.org/appendix/cli_reference/#appliance-commands where you can start/stop a group of VMs, never tried it, doesn't seem to have a boot order in the vAPP neither

@poddingue Thanks for your input. Yes I'm aware that basically everything on the VM is incorporated into the snapshot. Including settings and metadata. This is acctually why I was surprised that the creation date wasn't preserved as part of that metadata. And as you say, if one uses that metric to track VM history. Then it can, and will, throw you off. I'll gladly submit this as a feature request. But my gut feeling is that it is more akin to a bug than missing feature per se. Thanks!

The "PIF is not attached" usually means the network interface selected as the migration network isn't currently active on the target host. It can happen after upgrades if the host hasn't been fully rebooted. Worth checking whether a reboot of both hosts changes anything, and running xe pif-list to see whether that specific PIF shows currently-attached: true on the target. If the PIF looks attached in xe but migration still fails, might be worth a ping to Team-XAPI-Network.

From what I understand, the OS-to-iDRAC pass-through is a direct USB link between the host and the BMC, designed for the hypervisor host itself to talk to the iDRAC, not something that would naturally bridge through Xen's networking layer into a VM. That might be why the PIF shows up in XCP-ng but the VM still can't reach 169.254.0.1; the bare metal case works because the OS sits directly on the hardware with no virtualisation layer in between. If you need the VM to have direct BMC access, USB passthrough might be worth exploring; XCP-ng does support passing USB devices through to VMs (https://docs.xcp-ng.org/compute#usb-passthrough), though I'm not certain the iDRAC virtual USB NIC would show up as a passthrough-able device. Might be worth a mention to @Team-Hypervisor-Kernel to find out; others here will know more than me.

Hello again, The updates have been made available and RPU with xostor should be safe to run https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2026/05/07/may-2026-updates-2-for-xcp-ng-8-3-lts/