XenServer-8 to XCP-NG
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I migrated vom Xenserver 8.2 to xcp-ng 8.3. But you should disable the Domain Join and Users, if you use.
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@cschulz XenServer 8.2 is Not XenServer8
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Hello,
I'm quite new to all of this so sorry if I'm making mistakes.
We currently have a pool of 3 servers on XenServer 8.4 (so 8.3 if I understood properly) on which we applied almost all updates lately, hosting around 10 VM.
The countdown message is displayed in XenCenter and after discovering it we planned to migrate to XCP-ng.I've followed the instructions and I tried to boot on the 8.3 iso, but when I do so there is no choice to migrate from XenServer but rather to install XCP-ng, is it the same ?
If it's not the same what choice do I have ? To install XCP-ng on one of the server and then migrate the VM to it using export/import, to then rebuild the pool on XCP-ng ? Unfortunately I don't have any other spare servers to use so I'm quite restricted in what I can do, and if possible I'd like no downtime.
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@psylo said in XenServer-8 to XCP-NG:
Hello,
I'm quite new to all of this so sorry if I'm making mistakes.
We currently have a pool of 3 servers on XenServer 8.4 (so 8.3 if I understood properly) on which we applied almost all updates lately, hosting around 10 VM.
The countdown message is displayed in XenCenter and after discovering it we planned to migrate to XCP-ng.I've followed the instructions and I tried to boot on the 8.3 iso, but when I do so there is no choice to migrate from XenServer but rather to install XCP-ng, is it the same ?
If it's not the same what choice do I have ? To install XCP-ng on one of the server and then migrate the VM to it using export/import, to then rebuild the pool on XCP-ng ? Unfortunately I don't have any other spare servers to use so I'm quite restricted in what I can do, and if possible I'd like no downtime.
The only way I found to migrate is export to OVF format using XenCenter, install XCP-ng from zero and after import all VM's using XCP-ng Center.
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When we released XCP-ng 8.3, migration from XenServer 8 did work. However, XS8 has kept on evolving, rolling-release style, so it's possible that the current installation ISOs for XCP-ng 8.3 are not recent enough to migrate a current day XenServer 8.
However, the problems I would expect are not the ones you describe. I would expect the upgrade process to go smoothtly, and then the XAPI service fail to start because our version of XAPI sees a database that is too recent.
If no choices are displayed to upgrade an existing XenServer 8 with the 8.3 ISO, the reason will be provided in the logs in
/tmp/install-log
(ALT+RIGHT thenview /tmp/install-log
, IIRC). It can be several things: a first boot process not complete on XS side, booting in BIOS mode when the system is currently UEFI, ... But there's also the possibility that the platform number we use to detect an upgradeable product has changed. -
@stormi said in XenServer-8 to XCP-NG:
But there's also the possibility that the platform number we use to detect an upgradeable product has changed.
This is probably the case. When I tried in-place upgrades, XCP would sometimes see it, but not always. I expected that to be the case when trying out XCP 8.2.1, but this would still happen occasionally on XCP 8.3 as well. (Given that XenServer 8 is reporting itself as 8.4, Citrix probably did this on purpose.)
I'm assuming this is also why XVA export/import also doesn't work and live migrations don't work?
I did eventually just spin up Xen Orchestrator Community Edition in my environment so I could use Warm Migrations, as XO Enterprise does not offer those. (Knowing that if something went wrong, I wouldn't be able to get support for that, but it beats out having to rebuild around 200 customized-for-clients VMs and migrating their data using software tools)
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@stormi said in XenServer-8 to XCP-NG:
When we released XCP-ng 8.3, migration from XenServer 8 did work. However, XS8 has kept on evolving, rolling-release style, so it's possible that the current installation ISOs for XCP-ng 8.3 are not recent enough to migrate a current day XenServer 8.
However, the problems I would expect are not the ones you describe. I would expect the upgrade process to go smoothtly, and then the XAPI service fail to start because our version of XAPI sees a database that is too recent.
If no choices are displayed to upgrade an existing XenServer 8 with the 8.3 ISO, the reason will be provided in the logs in /tmp/install-log (ALT+RIGHT then view /tmp/install-log, IIRC). It can be several things: a first boot process not complete on XS side, booting in BIOS mode when the system is currently UEFI, ... But there's also the possibility that the platform number we use to detect an upgradeable product has changed.
I'll try to collect the logs, thank your for the
What if the XAPI service fail to start ? Is it recoverable ? Should I study @ricardowz because it'll be safer ?
@reiichi001 thanks for your comment I didn't know about this option. Did it work properly on your side for all the VMs ?
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@psylo We are working on updating XAPI in XCP-ng 8.3. When that's done, a simple
yum update
should be enough to recover. But for now @ricardowz's or @reiichi001's way is safer. -
@stormi Thank you for your reply.
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Hi all,
So I finally tried the warm migration because we are currently working 24/7 so it appeared to be the best option to minimize downtime.
It has actually worked pretty well for almost all VMs but for 4 of them it won't work and I'm not sure why.
When I launch the warm migration process it's actually launching a shutdown of the VM and not a snapshot of the VM, then I receive an error message telling me that the destination VM has not been found (for sure it doesn't exist at the moment).
I'm launching the process with option "start the migrated VM", both server are accessing the same ISCSI storageI've checked and the only information I could find was talking about the VM needing at least one snapshot and all of them have it. I tried to backup/restore one of the VM to warm migrate the restored one and it worked like a charm. The xensource.log doesn't help me a lot to find the error (but maybe I'm not looking at the good place).
I'm migrating all VMs from the same source host to the same destination host(which have the same hardware).
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@psylo
xensource.log
anddaemon.log
will usually give more information about failed operations. It could also be an issue in XOA's warm migration code in specific cases.