IPv6 support in XCP-ng for the management interface - feedback wanted

olivierlambert

Maybe we should release another ISO after your latest fix is accepted in XAPI

BenjiReis

Hi all!

A new ISO is available here to test IPv6 in dom0.
Whats new:

aligned patches with Citrix upstream merges
fix regardings tunnels, Sriovs network, VLAN and bonds when creating from IPv6 PIF
netinstall support in IPv6 (netinstall repo info coming soon)
NFS support in an IPv6 Pool

Do not use this in production this is an experimental feature!

What to test?

upgrade from an already configured IPv6 host
netinstall when a repo will be available
what you'd normally do with an xcp-ng host

For fresh installs, do not forget to add the ipv6 rpm repo for future updates:

[xcp-ng-ipv6]
name=XCP-ng IPv6 Repository
baseurl=http://mirrors.xcp-ng.org/8/8.2/ipv6/x86_64/ http://updates.xcp-ng.org/8/8.2/ipv6/x86_64/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-xcpng

For existing IPv6 hosts, yum update --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=xcp-ng-ipv6

stormi

Reviving this thread. @BenjiReis worked hard to bring ipv6 support for the management interface of hosts, contributed many pull requests to the XAPI project for that, modified the installer and xsconsole to make them compatible with ipv6, created a test ISO image, but we got no feedback at all.

So I'm calling for help from the community again: there's no way we can get every real world situations in our lab, and you collectively have vastly superior knowledge about networking than we have alone, so if we want this feature to be more than an experiment in the next XCP-ng release, we need feedback from testers.

If you have the hardware and time to test, please consider jumping in

BenjiReis

a little recap of the thread for anyone who'd like to help us by testing the feature.

XCP-ng IPv6 recap

A test ISO is available to test a new feature: having your XCP-ng hosts with an IPv6 management interface.

To have an IPv6 host, you must either install a new host or upgrade one with the test ISO.

More info on the dedicated blogpost
Please give any feedback in this thread!

Known limitations

IPv6 Static only for now
HA not tested yet
Dual stack (both IPv4 and IPv6) can lead to DNS issues and the host will use IPv4 for its XAPI operations.

AtaxyaNetwork

Hello all !

I was able to make some tests these last days on my lab servers.
My lab is currently 1 Dell R610 with IPv6 only. I plan to add 2 more servers to test all the features.

I already noticed some blocking points:

The DNS server (v6) that I gave at installation is no longer present once the server is installed. I had to edit /etc/resolv.conf and add my server by hand to have working DNS.
Once the server is installed, I tried to do a quick deploy via https://xen-orchestra.com/?#!/xoa, without success. I asked @olivierlambert to add a AAAA DNS record, because it was not there in the first place, but once the record was added, the quick deploy still didn't work. I don't have any debug message to give back, and I don't know how to debug more

Feel free to contact me if you want to do some live testing, or if you need more information !

Thanks for all this work !

Cécile ~ AtaxyaNetwork

olivierlambert

Thanks a lot for your feedback

@BenjiReis will come back to you soon!

BenjiReis

@ataxyanetwork hi! Thanks for the feedback.

Did you set your host in both ipv4 & ipv6?

AtaxyaNetwork

@benjireis Hello !

For now, I set only IPv6 in my lab.

I wanted to test the different features in an IPv6 environment only.

I can add IPv4, but I think the aim is to have XCP-ng working in IPv6, right ?

Cécile ~ AtaxyaNetwork

BenjiReis

@ataxyanetwork you're right. I just wanted to know to reproduce as much as possible your environment. Plus IPv6 only will be easier to debug, dual mode can have some weird magic happening at time!

I'll take a look ASAP and post here about my findings

AtaxyaNetwork

@benjireis Great !

Don't hesitate to ping me if you have questions !

Cécile ~ AtaxyaNetwork

LeMatz

Hey guys,

first thing we found during the installation:

The DNS dialogue doesn't like the shortest possible way to write an IPv6. According to my local nslookup, the IP notation is correct.

But if I fill the zeroes out, everything works fine:

Thanks,
Matthias

LeMatz

Hey guys,

one more thing:

On the console, we are able to see the network address:

But on XCP-ng Center, the IP is not shown:

I'm not sure, if this is merely a problem with the Center, or if XOA has this problem as well. We are not able to install the XOA, as we tried to bind our free IPv4 address to XOA as well and just got an error:

Cheers,
Matthias

olivierlambert

Thanks for your feedback @LeMatz

@BenjiReis will take a look.

For the short notation, I think that was simply not taken into account.
What about the repo? It should work out of the box (our repo are IPv6 compatible)
XCP-ng Center is not maintained by us, so we won't solve this anyway. For XO, it should work out of the box. Your issue is with the XO deploy thing, we are aware of it

LeMatz

Hey @olivierlambert,

sure thing, thanks.

I edited the thing with the repo out of my post, I was just a bit too blind.

Is there any way on the XCP-ng host to test the DNS resolution? "dig" is not available there. Our host is somehow not able to resolve to mirrors.xcp-ng.org.
Our chosen DNS server is very well able to resolve your mirror.

I know that XCP-ng Center is not maintained by your team, but it's currently the only GUI that works for us :).

Is there a different way to deploy XO instead of the quick install? I'm not sure, if the build from source is worth the effort.

Thanks again,
Matthias

hoerup

@lematz
In the first picture of "hostname and dns configuration":
It doesn't look like you have any double colon '::' in the first 2 entries but you have them in all fields on the last picture

LeMatz

@hoerup Jeeez, you are right, thanks a lot.
I'm feeling bad now

Reminder: do not work past 9 p.m. :D.

olivierlambert

haha good catch, so it might support short format ipv6 Can you double check?

LeMatz

@olivierlambert Well, I'd like to. But the console is giving me a hard time.

Our given DNS servers were not recognized:

I'm not able to change the entries. Hitting "Enter" does not do anything. For all the other entries works "Enter" perfectly.

Olivier recommended in https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/5412/installation-of-xo-with-just-one-ip/2?_=1642003322780 to use one IPv6 for dom0 and bind the IPv4 to a VM like pfSense. Thanks to MAC-address binding of our provider, that made everything worse. Of cause we can't have the same MAC-address on more than one NIC.

I think this IPv6 experiment ends here for us.

Thanks for all the answers and help!
Matz

olivierlambert

Sadly @BenjiReis is really busy ATM working on our next 8.2.1 release But he'll come back here as soon he can!

LeMatz

It's okay, releases are important