The beta release of XCP-ng 7.6 is available right now .

What changed

• Based on XenServer 7.6 (see https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-7-6/). It's mostly a maintenance update.
• New welcome HTML page when you enter the IP address of your server in a web browser. See screenshots in my next comment to this thread.
• Experimental packages:
  • We still have the experimental ZFS support and zfs packages have been updated to 0.7.11.
  • The modified qemu-dp package for Ceph support is being worked on (patches need to be updated). Documentation draft still at https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/wiki/Ceph-on-XCP-ng-7.5-or-later but it's incomplete so I repeat here my call for help: this page needs a step-by-step procedure. Anyone with a github account can improve it.
• Fixed some upgrade bugs in our packages.
• In case you missed it: the installer now has support for software RAID 1.
• In case you missed it too, there's a network installer ISO available too.
• More proprietary packages removed because we can't distribute them:
  • Citrix packages, most of them related to their work on improving the storage layer (smapiv3, GFS2...)
    • xapi-clusterd
    • sm-transport-lib: was LGPL in 7.5, became proprietary in 7.6
    • xapi-storage-plugins: was LGPL in 7.5, became proprietary in 7.6
    • livepatch-utils
  • Emulex management tools. "elxocm" stands for "Emulex One Command Manager". Can probably be downloaded from their site.
    • elxocmcore
    • elxocmcorelibs
    • elxocmlibhbaapi
  • QLogic tools. Available on their website.
    • QConvergeConsoleCLI-Citrix
    • QCS-CLI

Documentation :

I structured the home page of our wiki and started a thread for what I called the "let's improve the documentation together" campaign.

• Glass half full: everybody likes the idea and agrees that we need a great documentation, and some have contributed.
• Glass half empty: most pages remain empty at the moment.

We, as a community, really need your help. Can we manage to fill, say, half the empty pages before we release XCP-ng 7.6?

How to upgrade

There are two different upgrade methods: classical upgrade via installation ISO or upgrade using yum.

Before upgrading, remember that it is a pre-release, so the risks are higher than with a final release. But if you can take the risk, please do and tell us how it went and what method you used!

Reminder: always upgrade the master first (reboot it first, THEN the slaves).
Also disable HA before upgrading.

Now to the upgrade methods:

Upgrade via the installation ISO image

• Download https://xcp-ng.org/7.6/xcp-ng-7.6.0-beta.iso
• Check the integrity of the downloaded ISO:
  • MD5: 62ac5f220d3d544193063430bcbb6ba5
  • SHA256: d4672650c8066b9de3de7eafcd10cee50b7c111e726dbe4217814c76791678e5
• Copy the ISO (byte to byte copy, such as using dd) to an usb stick and boot it. Or find another way to boot the ISO.

Upgrade via the network installation ISO image

• Download https://xcp-ng.org/7.6/xcp-ng-7.6.0-beta-netinstall.iso
• Check the integrity of the downloaded ISO:
  • MD5: d817543299649e1237a1ebbe21dcaf19
  • SHA256: c7a94c267407b4a7c00155614d97d6feaa9ba6afd0c6ac1218a8b3ffdb05e0e7
• Make sure the server has access either to *.xcp-ng.org or to a local mirror
• Copy the ISO (byte to byte copy, such as using dd) to an usb stick and boot it. Or find another way to boot the ISO.
• Do not use the default repository URL, it would install the latest stable version instead of the development version.
• Use this URL instead: https://updates.xcp-ng.org/netinstall/7.6/

Upgrade from 7.5 with yum or Xen Orchestra
From 7.5 only. See below for 7.4.x.

This method is still experimental, because there are more things that can go wrong when you upgrade 500 packages one by one than when you reinstall from scratch (which is what the installation ISO does, without losing your data of course).

Upgrade via installation ISO is also the only upgrade method that creates a backup of the old system to a backup partition before installing the new version.

With all these warnings given, we still think we made it stable enough for you to try it!

As root:

wget https://updates.xcp-ng.org/7/xcp-ng-7.6.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/xcp-ng.repo
yum clean metadata

Then either apply the patches from Xen Orchestra, or run:

yum update
reboot

If you want to try to upgrade via yum from a version lower than 7.5, it should work, but it's not been tested yet. And there are additional steps. See https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/wiki/Upgrade-Howto.

What to test

Mostly that what used to work still works! Report or ask anything as replies to this thread.

If you have QLogic or Emulex hardware, please test that they still work properly without the proprietary packages that we removed. From what I know they are only management tools. If you need those tools, then please download and install them from the vendor and write down your steps in the wiki for the other users.