XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha 🚀

stormi

@hoerup said in XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha :

What is current status? What is the rough expectation of next alpha/beta release

The next planned release should be the first beta. There's no precise ETA yet, but first quarter of 2023 is a likely window.

Applying updates regularly on top of the alpha will also give you the same end-result.

There are a lot of updated packages that are being prepared. They're currently in the xcp-ng-testing yum repository, because we haven't had time to test them all in our internal CI. All I could assess is that they install well (yum update --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing) and that the server I installed them to rebooted without any visible issue. Once tested, early January, they'll be moved to the xcp-ng-base repository and offered as updates to anyone running yum update on their 8.3. If you want to give it a go ahead of time, you can install them and see if everything works well or not, so that we can quickly work on any issues early January.

Recent work on 8.3 touched:

the installer (soft RAID support improvements, IPv6 support, contribution of various small improvements to upstream repositories...)
automated installation ISO generation
adding memtest86+ to the installer, both in BIOS and UEFI modes
upgrading all packages to the same level as Xenserver 8 Stream's (that's the new name for Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud) preview update channels - we had 4 months of changes to catch up with.
redirecting http://ip_or_name_of_xcpng_server/ to https://ip_or_name_of_xcpng_server/
ongoing work with XenServer on the python2 to python3 transition
work on UEFI certificate handling, to reach a stage where it answers both XenServer's and our needs
and more.

jhansen

Hello,
I have some trouble with update from 8.2 to 8.3

I boot the installation from USB with Image xcp-ng-8.3.0-alpha2.
Everything works until I get to the installation. The backup of the old version is still made, then this error message appears:
Old partition layout is unsupported, run prepare_host_upgrade and try again. Reboot
The 8.2 installation is a 3 month old fresh installation, I doubt there is an old partition type in this 8.2 version.
I removed all disks except the boot disk which only contains the XCP-NG system. Still the same error.
The partition structure of the disk is as follows:

Model: ATA TS512GSSD720 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: pmbr_boot

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
4 1049kB 538MB 537MB bios_grub, legacy_boot
1 538MB 4295MB 3757MB ext3
2 4296MB 8590MB 4294MB ext3
3 8591MB 512GB 504GB lvm

Does anyone have an idea what's going wrong.

I don't want to do a fresh installation because then I have to restore a lot of data. It's my test machine and I have a backup, but with 29 TB it takes days to restore and without data there is little point in testing 8.3.

regards Joerg

olivierlambert

Hi,

Can you give the output of lsblk, it's more readable to me

jhansen

@olivierlambert
Does this help?

sda                                                                                                 8:0    0   477G  0 disk
├─sda4                                                                                              8:4    0   512M  0 part
├─sda2                                                                                              8:2    0     4G  0 part
├─sda3                                                                                              8:3    0   469G  0 part
│ └─XSLocalEXT--d7a8bce5--29b3--5d83--f41f--5307f2e1b1bb-d7a8bce5--29b3--5d83--f41f--5307f2e1b1bb 253:0    0 468.9G  0 lvm   /run/sr-mount/d7a8bce5-29b3-5d83-f41f-5307f2e1b1bb
└─sda1

olivierlambert

This is the old partition scheme

It can't be a fresh install, it's not possible.

edit: ah wait. Can you do a mount command?

edit 2: a basic lsblk should display where the partition is mounted, did you copy/pasted everything?

jhansen

@olivierlambert
Thanks for help by the way

I'am shure that it is a new installation from 3 month ago, it is a new Server and I bought it 3 month ago.

regards Joerg

jhansen

@olivierlambert
Sorry I miss one line:
└─sda1 8:1 0 3.5G 0 part /

olivierlambert

You should have 2x 18G partitions (/ and a backup one), 1x 4G partition (/var/log) and a 512MB partition (/boot)

jhansen

@olivierlambert
My
Boot has 537MB
/ has 3757MB
Backup 4294MB

olivierlambert

Okay so this is the old partition scheme. Can you repeat exactly what did you do with this machine? I mean initially. I don't know how to even get the old partition scheme in the first place with XCP-ng (there's 0 edition of XCP-ng with this old partition scheme, it's only before XenServer 6.5)

jhansen

@olivierlambert
I disable all hard drives and put in a new sda and do a fresh installation.
So I can always go back if something doesn't work out.
In any case, thanks for the help.
Regards Joerg

olivierlambert

That's really weird, I don't understand how it's possible to install a fresh XCP-ng (without doing any upgrade) with the old partition layout

jhansen

@olivierlambert
Neither do I.
I thought I might have taken an old SSD, but that wasn't the case, the part was new.
Well, sometimes you lose and sometimes the others win.
Fresh installation
But thanks anyway

olivierlambert

Adding @yann in the conversation, so we need to check if it's even possible the old layout could be created in the installer code.

Did you use the regular installation or something else? (answer file, automated install etc.)

tjkreidl

@jhansen I'd suggest booting off some Linux rescue disk and just redoing all the partitions manually. I ran into an upgrade issue once on a Dell box because of some stupid little extra utility partition they had in there. See: http://xenserver.pl/author/tobias-kreidl
Look for "The (In)famous Dell Utility Partition."

jhansen

@olivierlambert
Unfortunately, I only keep the latest version of the iso files. I have the xcp-ng-8.2.1.iso here and I think that was it, but it could also have been the previous version.

tjkreidl

@jhansen Any old Linux distribution recovery-like boot disk should work, as long as you can get to the partitioning app.

jhansen

@tjkreidl
Mayby you are on the right trace.
It is a Dell Server.
This time i will wipe the disk before installation.
As the Data is on other disk i will try to mount then afterwards.
Thanks

jhansen

@tjkreidl
Do you think a simple reseize of the different partition will do it?

tjkreidl

@jhansen said in XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha :

@tjkreidl
Mayby you are on the right trace.
It is a Dell Server.
This time i will wipe the disk before installation.
As the Data is on other disk i will try to mount then afterwards.
Thanks

I am willing to bet you got bitten by the Dell utility partition disk issue. And, yes, best to wipe it out. Or delete it and redo one of the other partitions. But frankly, you will really want the new 36.5 GB total layout with the dual 18GB partitions, etc., that was mentioned above. You will want the right order of partitions to match what the XCP-ng installation wants to do at some point, but it should redo the layout I hope once you get rid of that extra Dell partition. Check out what I did in my article referenced above:
"The solution was simply to delete that sda1 partition altogether using fdisk and re-install. Deleting the partition can be performed live on the host prior to the installation process."