XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha 🚀

Anonabhar

I was just wondering... Is it just my installation or is there no XenTools ISO in the dropdown for virtual disks?

EDIT: Never mind.. Its a XCP-ng Center thing.. I can mount the ISO from XO (it does not show up in XCP-ng Center in the dropdown list or even when it is mounted)..

jameso

No offence to cocoon for doing great work with their release, but will v20.04.01 or variant be made available to support 8.3?

Anonabhar

Oh! Is this a new feature in XCP-ng 8.3????

If so... YEA!!!!

olivierlambert

It's a new feature added in SMAPIv1, creating XAPI tasks for the coalesce process (done by Mark Syms at XenServer). I was VERY happy to saw that pull request 1y ago

cocoon

As I had now a chance to take a quick look, XO Light will be a great addition when it's ready

Currently I cannot test the Console, but the Dashboard looks nice and of course I would have some ideas what would be great to have there, but you might already have a list.
But I would say for troubleshooting to extract logs and use the bugtool might be handy to have available.

I could not get any VM button to do anything, it simply might not be implemented right now, like poweron etc.

But I have seen at least one possible problems that you might want to add to a FAQ:
If you have ublock adblocker installed it seems to cause problems if you don't whitelist:

@jameso said in XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha :

No offence to cocoon for doing great work with their release, but will v20.04.01 or variant be made available to support 8.3?

Just my 2 cents:
I think chances are a bit better now, because it looks like both teams (XCP-NG and Citrix) are working more closely together now.
In the past I would have said that development goes much more in different directions and so new things would usually not be added to the client as nobody is really working on it.

But now it could happen maybe if release is near or ready. I would not expect it for alphas and betas, but mostly depends on if @borzel will find the time then.

olivierlambert

@cocoon VM actions are already planned (next step after the graphs, so maybe before 2023, but there's very little time now )

About ublock, I don't remember having issues with it, but obviously, we'll test (also, on the longer run, if the "online version" will fail to load, we'll fallback to an locally "older" installed version.

cocoon

@olivierlambert
In that Browser I have even more blockers like AdNauseam + uBlock + NoScript, but the problem can be the same, just to remember that Browsers might have blocking utils in it if there is a problem for someone.

olivierlambert

But that's weird that Adblockers will block our domain, which is harmless and without any spam How could we explain it's "flagged"?

cocoon

@olivierlambert
I can't explain it, just had seen the error
and here it seems to have happened, too:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/62646075/19868457

olivierlambert

Might worth a contact to the plugin authors to put it in a authorized list (or avoid to put it in a block list)

apz

Is this release technically the point where XCP-ng starts to veer off more from the XS source as to my understanding they're already keeping some parts out of public repos nowdays?

It'd be interesting to see newer Xen for example in the future and the SMAPIv3!

olivierlambert

We can't answer since it's not only on us. But on our side, we have more knowledge and more capabilities than previously to make our own moves. However, we want to keep our "upstream first" philosophy and convince XS to stay close to us. That's why we spend some times to get decent pull requests and some patience to get them merged

We truly hope to share a common future where we wouldn't have to work twice on the same problems, but instead share our man power to be more efficient together. The rest is on XS team

Also, as said before, in increasing order of complexity:

Get a more recent Xen version
Get a more recent Linux kernel version
Get a more recent platform (beyond CentOS 7)

Anonabhar

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if this is a bug or if it is something specific to my setup. But.. I just noticed that a 'rescan' seems to be happening on my lab server every 30 seconds..

I noticed this because I was making a new template for XOCE and was deleting snapshots (viewing the /var/log/SMlog to wait until the coalescing was complete) and noticed that this was happening.

I will include the log file for viewing.. The log file is trimmed from 0730 -> present so it would fit in the posting limits.. But this was happening from the begging of the rotated logfile..

smlog.txt

~Peg

olivierlambert

This is normal Adding @ronan-a in the loop to get a confirmation that SMAPIv1 is scanning every 30 secs.

ronan-a

@Anonabhar Could you upload the other logs (xensource.log, daemon.log, etc)? There is no valid reason to have a call to cleanup.py (not a SR scan) every 30s if there is nothing to coalesce.

Anonabhar

@ronan-a Sure.. I would be happy to... I just had to append a .txt to the end of the file in order to upload it.. Please remove .txt and decompress

logs2.tar.gz.txt

Fungusware

So I read about the 'VM snapshot with disk exclusion' feature.

Is this supported at the XAPI level now? If so, how would one go about using it?

Regards

BenjiReis

@Fungusware Hi!

Yes this feature is supported at XAPI level, the VM.snapshot method now has a ignore_vdis field which is a list of VDI ref to not include in the snapshot.
This also available through xe:

xe vm-snapshot vm=... ignore-vdi-uuids=uuid1,uuid2...

Regards

olivierlambert

@Fungusware Yes, @BenjiReis spent some time to make that contribution to XAPI upstream, see https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api/pull/4563

benjamreis opened this pull request in xapi-project/xen-api

closed Add `ignore_vdis` to `VM.snapshot` method #4563

olivierlambert

Note: this is already implemented in Xen Orchestra since a while (by default we try to ignore the [NOBAK] disk if XAPI is able to do it, which is now the case for 8.3)