XO Lite: building an embedded UI in XCP-ng

apz

@olivierlambert I think this is exactly what XCP-ng needed. Sure, management and backups with XO centrally is the main point, but at times I need up access the server locally to see what's going on, especially in situations where XO is running somewhere else and the XCP-ng server in question runs the firewall for example and for some reason the firewall never came up after a reboot.

A basic access to the virtuals' consoles and the option to start/stop/reboot them alone will get far, right now I can do that the restarting part over SSH, but not view the console.

I XO Lite would be perfect with these options in addition to being completely locally stored. Right now it seems to just load the script from somewhere else, which doesn't help if the firewall virtual is down.

But yeah, good work, excellent project. I'll be following it with great interest.

olivierlambert

@apz right now it's not embedded because it's easier to get all the latest updates without generating a new rpm package every day

But yeah, the goal is to have it offline, which is helpful when you have network problems (ie XOA can't reach it), at least you have something else than the CLI.

apz

@olivierlambert I figured it was a case of work-in-progress software and I'm fine with it knowing it will be 100% local when it's ready for showtime.

Greg_E

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.

tony

Its a start of something great, need more functions though! For example:

VM controls (start/stop)
VM Information
VM Import/Export
Add/remove storage
SR Information
Insert/remove dvd
Toolstacksrestart
Warnings (low memory/storage space)

xisco

@tony I agree, but I think the most important is to start/stop a machine, the other can be done with XO

Gheppy

To be a good alternative to XCP-NG Center you have to do at least what XCP-NG Center does.
E.g:

I haven't found in XOCE, so far, how to rearrange the VHDs of a VM, the only method, which I found , is to reattach them in the order I want,
To be able to snopshoot,
To be able to import and export,
To be able to migrate a VM, implicitly to be able to add another host on which to migrate the VM. This is good when the current host has a problem,
To group VMs by hosts, sometimes it is more useful to see which VMs are affected if you restart a host, XOCE displays them all but you cannot group/subgroup them on hosts that they are running on,
It can be restarted even if it is the only host, XOCE only wants it if the VMs are all turned off.

In essence, XCP-NG Center does almost everything XOCE does, but manually. Which is OK when you have a breakdown.

Don't get me wrong I use XOCE the most and I understand its importance but sometimes a XCP-NG Center is good to have, especially a local one on the host.

dane7791

i agree with @gheppy to have XCP-ng center run as a service on a sin out VM would be nice and with all the features of XOA instead of having to run XOA from sources to get all the features...you can run snapshots on a schedule with the center app and keep X number of iterations but are limited to local drive. instead of XO LITE why not go for xcp-ng center as a service with all options to run on a VM...i don know about most but i like the look and feel of xcp-ng center

olivierlambert

@Gheppy it's a bit off topic but:

You can rearrange disk in Xen Orchestra, you can drag and drop them

I'm not sure to understand the rest, because that's precisely the goal of XO Lite, being able to get rid of XCP-ng Center to manage your pool, with equivalent features.

Did you missed the first post maybe? @dane7791 seems affected by the same problem. Please take time to read the first post with the link to the blog article. Everything is explained in there

adriangabura

@olivierlambert

ERROR: cannot verify lite.xen-orchestra.com's certificate, issued by ‘/C=US/O=Let's Encrypt/CN=R3’:
  Issued certificate has expired.
To connect to lite.xen-orchestra.com insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'.

Just a heads-up your certificate expired.

olivierlambert

Hi,

No the certificate is fine. The issue is on your side, from the XCP-ng version you have I assume (not fully up to date?)

Capture d’écran de 2022-05-02 10-49-41.png

john.c

@olivierlambert The command for wget specified in the initial post, will always re-download the xolite file. So can't be used in a crontab operation during the beta, in order to update the file locally.

However the following may be utilised as part of a crontab command section, line entry.

wget -N https://lite.xen-orchestra.com/dist/ -O /opt/xensource/www/xolite.html

The additional option I added to the post here, will cause wget to check if the remote file to be downloaded has changed at all. Then only download the file if the remote has changed, otherwise will not. That will therefore as a result save a lot of bandwidth, for Vates when downloading the html file, if the check and download isn't too often!

So when this item has been validated, and if Vates agrees and allows can the original post be updated with the new wget specified here please?

Also the crontab entry and your downloaded xolite html will also need to be removed, once the XO Lite fully gets, rolled out as part of an updated XCP-ng. This in my opinion will have the likely hood of happening, during one of the 8.2 point releases as long as it fits the LTS rules, more likely though will be in 8.3 or later, and while in the next LTS release series.

john.c

@olivierlambert @clemencebx What vocabulary will be used when there's at least two layers (levels) of priority? Think of how old legacy bios system boards, handled the IDE physical drive boot priority connections! As well as documented in the manuals, for said items.

redy

Hi,
Great work so far!
My suggestion is to have xo.little as little as possible, so:

create/add storage(iso) is a must to have
create/add network is a must to have
create/add VM is must to have
all other things can be done after installing XO
It was a challenge to configure a lab env. from scratch without WindowsPC so xo.lite is a good direction

konsultaner

@olivierlambert how can one contribute to XO-Lite? I might get some time for at least some simple features.

olivierlambert

Hi @konsultaner !

Let me ping the right person to assist on this

Byscripts

Hi @konsultaner.

I'll have to check with the XO Lite team to see what needs to be done, but I can already tell you how to set up the project and get on board.

Fork and clone the GitHub Repository
Go to the @xen-orchestra/lite directory
Copy the .env.dist file to .env and edit it to configure your XCP-ng server host URL (VITE_XO_HOST=http://...)
Install dependencies: yarn install
Run the dev server: yarn dev

If all has gone well, you should be able to access the XO Lite Dashboard from http://localhost:3000

Thank you.

konsultaner

why is this part of the commercial repo? what if the lite has some of the commercial features?

olivierlambert

what are you talking about? There's no "commercial repo" Xen Orchestra repo is where we store all the XO source code, and the whole code is aGPLv3. I don't understand why are you talking about a "commercial repo" ?

konsultaner

@olivierlambert I thought I need a license to use all features of XO? I didn't go through all the code. I have another project, that only provides non-commercial parts of the product in the official repo and the enterprise parts are in a private repo. So I wasn't sure if XO had all code hosted in that repo or just the free to use features? I wasn't ment to be offending, sorry.