Beginner advice - coming from Debian
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I have an older Xen set up running under a Debian Dom0. I think I installed this in Debian 10, and it has remained the same up through Debian 12. It does not seem that the Xen package in Debian is really maintained any more and the latest version is 4.17 from around 2022. The action seems to have moved over to XCP-ng, which is exciting but leaves me with choices on how to go forward with my "home lab" box.
I like having a Debian Dom0 - is this at all possible with XCP-ng?
Currently my Dom0 is taking care of using LVM snapshot capability to snapshot and then back up all of my DomU filesystems.
I also retain the ability to ssh into Dom0, in case I am not physically present and the server restarts and fails to bring everything back up. Then at least I can get in and manually fix the problems.
But perhaps the way I am going about things is just out of date, and I can solve these things better with a new XCP-ng based system? I am not even running Xen Orchestra on my system, since there is no official Debian package for it.
I also looked at installing proxmox as that seems quite popular. Overall, I think Xen is going to be a better choice for me.
Another option is that I somehow install Xen 4.19 on my Debian Dom0, without using the official Debian package which is still stuck on 4.17.
Any thoughts or advice appreciated.
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@WillEndure No you won't be able to customize your Dom0 to use Debian, XCP-ng is a distro in and of itself.
With XCP-ng you'd want to use Xen Orchestra to administer the environment, you can install this from source or purchase the XOA (Xen Orchestra Appliance).
Since this is a home lab, I would recommend just building from source, you can look at my profile if you want a scripted installation.
You can always SSH into Dom0 with XCP-ng.
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@WillEndure said in Beginner advice - coming from Debian:
I am not even running Xen Orchestra on my system, since there is no official Debian package for it.
Xen Orchestra isn't a package, perse it's something you build on Debian or Ubuntu, again I would recommend looking at my profile here on the forums or look up XOCE.
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@DustinB said in [Beginner advice - coming from Debian]> Xen Orchestra isn't a package, perse it's something you build on Debian or Ubuntu, again I would recommend looking at my profile here on the forums or look up XOCE.
Right. So one route I could go with this is to stick with Debian and Xen 4.17 for now, but build XOCE and start using that to administer the box. I notice that Debian sid has a Xen 4.19 package, so there is movement there.
Thanks for the build instructions.
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@WillEndure I've not tried to use XO with raw XEN, while it should work, you don't think you'd be able to take advantage of XO to its full potential.
Why are you keen on keeping raw XEN on Debian?
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No, it won't. You need a XAPI enabled host. Vanilla xen uses libxl, which is far from being like XAPI.
I love Debian and we use it in our entire production, in VMs. Virt hosts are XCP-ng based and I never access the shell, because there's no reasons to do it, everything goes via XAPI. Don't treat your virt hosts as pets, with specific config: they should be XCP-ng out of the box
