XCP-ng DR on Azure
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Hello All,
The company I work for has been migrating our MSP hosting business from our private data center to Azure. At the same time, we are also migrating our corporate resources from VMWare to XCP-ng. Historically we used Veeam to backup VMs to a local storage and then replicate critical servers to Azure Blob storage and we were able to use Veeam to restore those backups to Azure VMs for DR purposes.
Since XO has a built-in backup solution, we have been using that and I have found a method to create an SMB SR on Azure Blob so we can also have offsite backups, but we are missing the last step of the ability to restore as Azure VMs. We are storing the backups as multiple data blocks and encrypted, not in single VHD format.
I had an idea to see if I could install an XOA image as an Azure VM to read the backups, and that worked like a charm (XO from sources on top of Debian). What I would like to do now is create one or more XCP-ng Azure VMs and connect them to the XOA and then run nested virtualization for DR. Azure does support nested virtualization on specific VM SKUs.
Where I am running into resistance so far is after prepping the XCP-ng image and creating a VM on Azure, there is no network connectivity, and the console access is not functional yet. I have reviewed the guides to prep a Linux VM for Azure use, but I'm struggling with getting the correct distro commands to set the console port properly, etc. I also believe the XCP-ng kernel would not include drivers for Hyper-V and I am also having a challenge getting that sorted out as well.
Has anyone tried this or am I barking up a fruitless tree and would be better suited to work out another solution? Any feedback is welcome. Cheers!
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Hi,
Using Azure for nested means you need to ask them about it, because if it's broken, it's not on XCP-ng but on the underlying hypervisor. Sadly, it's really hard for us what's wrong in those cases, because nested is a can of worm in general.
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@olivierlambert Thank you for the quick response. I concur there may be additional Azure platform issues to check, and I am working on that now. I am a certified Azure Cloud Architect.
I can tell you that I was able to install the XCP-ng image on a local Hyper-V instance on Windows 11 and it looks to be operating normally. On my first attempt I set the XCP-ng management interface as DHCP, but I found that the gateway did not update after moving to Azure. On the next attempt I changed the local Hyper-V subnet to match the destination Azure one, but after the machine booted I was still unable to get connectivity.
I do wonder if it would help to get the Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V loaded on XCP-ng, but I have been unable to load Linux headers to make the install for the drivers. Microsoft says they support RHEL/CentOS, but until I see it work or fail myself, it's hard to know for sure.
Thanks Again.
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It's not a trivial scenario indeed. Dom0 is a PV guest (in other words: a VM) on top of an hypervisor (Xen), on top of an hypervisor (HyperV). As you can see, more layers means more problems
