Some thank-yous, feedback, and hints for those trying to get current builds of XO community edition running
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TL;DR: Debian 10.2 Netinstall iso, then use Jarli01 install script from Github.
(Current info as of xo-server 5.56.1 with xo-web 5.56.2)Hello everyone! I have been running XCP-ng since right around the time of the release of 7.6, thanks to @flipsidecreations videos about it. I was only somewhat familiar with Xenserver at the time. My company was a VMWare partner at the time, but I was looking for a change, as most potential clients in the area are priced out of VMWare, and it didn't make business sense to pay them the partner fees every year. After seeing some YouTube videos from Tom, I migrated my company's infrastructure to it after playing with it for a while. I'm now on version 8, and have been running really smoothly. Some of my VMs were direct exports from vCenter and imported into XCP-ng with no issues whatsoever.
I have also started getting some of my clients moved to it as we migrate them to new hardware and retiring old Windows Server versions. Today I was having some trouble with throwing together some temporary backups at one client. I was attempting to set up a remote to a SMB share on a PC on the network and use it as a backup target. Using AD domain credentials, I had no issues at all getting the remote connected, but backups were failing at what seemed like random times. something quick like a metadata backup was fine, and I could see the files at the target, but anything that took some time seemed to fail, stating the task was interrupted, same error as if I had aborted the backup task in the task list. I was quick to assume that the network or the target was to blame, as I have had such good luck with everything so far other than a couple of dopey mistakes I made long ago. (Don't look up my previous posts, LOL!) I have been messing with this all evening here, and this is what I found:
Background: my XO instances were set up using a fresh Debian 9 Netinstall media to a VM with more resources provisioned to them than what was probably necessary. I used the install script from @ronivay for my initial installs and updates. That script to build XO from sources wouldn't work when I upgraded to Debian 10, so I stuck with 9. My backups of my own infrastructure were directly to local storage on a separate XCP-ng host, and I haven't had much of an issue with that other than some occasional hangups which would seem to remedy themselves if I rebooted the XO server. I had mixed results trying backups to a SMB share set up as a target. It seemed like intermittently I would get failures. Now at this customer site, I could not get a full backup of even a small machine with a bare install of Windows Server 2019 before failure. I also noticed something weird happening where the on the console tab for a VM the console window would drop and disappear, and some sort of dropped connection error message would pop up and the entire XO site would lock up. This correlated with the failing backups as well. I gave up on the whole XO VM and started from scratch.
What I did successfully: I spun up a new VM, again with too much RAM and processor cores, installed Debian 10.2 netinstall, and again tried a new download of @ronivay's install script. He has it checking OS version, and it failed out on me and aborted because it says it requires Debian 8/9. I think his most recent work is using that on current builds of Ubuntu. I wanted Debian if at all possible, and tried the @DustinB (Jarli01) install script as a last resort before manually doing it myself. My initial Delta Backup of all the VMs on this host (Currently 288GB) to a Windows SMB share remote just completed successfully as I am writing this. Unfortunately, I don't know what the problem's root cause was, but this current setup seems stable.
Thanks again to the Vates team for spearheading what I think is blazing the pathway to the future for the Xen Project and also the community members supporting and helping people with the builds from source. I will surely get clients hooked up with Vates support offerings as soon as I get the opportunity to upgrade a client where it's economically feasible for them to have the support offering. I'd love to work with some paid XOA instances!
