Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems
-
@archw The network issues might be a deal breaker for us. It's comical how there's no automation or even well written instructions on how to "match" network interfaces. To say that, "in order to have a pool, all the host networks must be identical" is just insane. We don't have identical hosts or network cards throughout our infrastructure, because we upgrade it throughout the years. I've been trying in a test environment to re-order and match up network interfaces, but it's proving impossible. I don't see how anyone could use this product outside of a home lab scenario, which also makes me believe that's where it's used most.
-
@fakenuze we had the same challenge but managed to take care of this by changing the nic names.
Check out this article
https://support.citrix.com/s/article/CTX135809-how-to-change-order-of-nics-in-xenserver?language=en_US -
XCP-NG support/licensing ended up being too expensive for us to justify it. We would have been paying about the same amount as we were paying for VMWare before the price hike.
To get the multiyear pricing you have to pay for all those years up front. VMWare did not have a same restriction pre price hike.
-
In the FWIW department, I've now done four sites. Network thing I mentioned above took about an hour to figure out and was a bit confusing. Once I did one (and made a little cheat sheet on how I did it), the rest of the sites were easy.
Arch
-
Our three main problems are:
snapshots snapshots snapshots
just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.
-
@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:
Our three main problems are:
snapshots snapshots snapshots
just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.
We switched from iSCSI to NFS and never looked back, the performance is pretty good, thin provisioning, snapshots coalescale pretty fast and life is good.
The setup is rather easy as well as there is no need to tweak the XCP's multipathing configuration. -
@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:
Our three main problems are:
snapshots snapshots snapshots
just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.
Thin based SRs are recommended for a reason as they give better performance and also take up less storage space. You can get really good performance if using NFS 4.0 or higher (best when done using NFS 4.2 and using pNFS to its fullest extent).
With full flash storage target using NFS 4.2 and pNFS to its fullest extent and you'll have the capacity to benefit from features which have been developed, specifically to be paired with SSD storage.
-
Also CBT might help to reduce the coalesce work needed in general.
-
@john-c
NFS is no solution compared tu fast iSCSI Storage. To get in the performance-range of out ISCSI Flashsystem you have to buy Netapp which costs you three times as much.If you have to pay this much for a storage to get the same faetures as before you can stay on vmware.
-
@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:
@john-c
NFS is no solution compared tu fast iSCSI Storage. To get in the performance-range of out ISCSI Flashsystem you have to buy Netapp which costs you three times as much.If you have to pay this much for a storage to get the same faetures as before you can stay on vmware.
Does your current storage support NFS?
If yes, you should give it a try and atleast benchmark it, maybe you'll be suprised. -
@rfx77 use cbt backups and no coalesce and snapshot issues anymore.
-
@nikade No our current storage does not support nfs. but which enterprise grade-storage beside top end Netapp and Dell PowerStor really do??
-
CBT is not supported wit CommVault
CBT is Beta in XOOther Backup vendors cannot compete when you have a broad spectrum of Agent needs.
-
@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:
@nikade No our current storage does not support nfs. but which enterprise grade-storage beside top end Netapp and Dell PowerStor really do??
The TrueNAS storage products either the physical TrueNAS hardware products from iXSystems or using TrueNAS Scale download installation on a server of your own choosing. The recent release of TrueNAS Scale 24.04.2 is likely to really do well as SR for XCP-ng. It's performance is second to none and also will protect data integrity and also can do both SCSI and NFS.
https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/
https://www.truenas.com/f-series/
https://www.truenas.com/m-series/
https://www.truenas.com/r-series/ -
@john-c
I would not compare TrueNAS to IBM, HP, Dell, Netapp,... I have never seen this as a serious storage backend for VmWare or HyperV in a mission-critical environment. And today i have to say that you find this types of environmets in all customer sizes.
TrueNAS is also way more expensive than any IBM FlashSystem
-
@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:
@john-c
I would not compare TrueNAS to IBM, HP, Dell, Netapp,... I have never seen this as a serious storage backend for VmWare or HyperV in a mission-critical environment. And today i have to say that you find this types of environmets in all customer sizes.
TrueNAS is also way more expensive than any IBM FlashSystem
Your rather mistaken as there's a wide variety of US Fortune 500 companies and the US Government which use TrueNAS in their organisations. Additionally Vates is using a TrueNAS instance in their infrastructure!
Also you don't have to use their hardware products you can roll your own TrueNAS by installing it on a compute server originally produced by another company.
https://www.truenas.com/virtualization/
https://www.truenas.com/clients/
https://www.truenas.com/case-studies/
https://www.truenas.com/h-series/ -
You sound a bit grumpy today @rfx77
-
@rfx77 there are several other options, alike a3 is one good agentless solution that runs xcp-ng cbt backups. XOA is allready having in beta and is focussing on getting 100%, we run our backups on cbt and it seems to work allrwsdy very good. Coalesce with cbt is almost instant.
I know Nakivo is also planning on adding xcp-ng to there solution kn the near future. -
Sorry for that but i am fighting to tune and get backup right for nearly a week now and it is hard to find a real 100% solution.
the migration from vmware gives us lots of headaces because of tight storage space and the snapshot problematic -
CBT will be helpful for you, as @rtjdamen said
