XCP-ng 7.6 beta

stormi

Good morning, afternoon, evening or night to everybody.

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.

olivierlambert

Yay! Happy testing!

Aleksander

Congratulate for realise.
It is great news.

stormi

And I had forgotten to mention the new welcome page!

See why we need to improve the documentation together real fast? There's a big button that will send people directly to it!

revtel

@stormi, would you please let us know what the impact is of the removed packages?

What functions are lost by not having xapi-clusterd?
What functions are lost by not having sm-transport-lib?
What functions are lost by not having xapi-storage-plugins?
What functions are lost by not having livepatch-utils?

Also - it seems apparent that Citrix is making every effort to close source the project. Are there any attorney types on the list that understand the licensing requirements of LGPL? I'm not expert on this at all - but the official "gpl" page seems to indicate that once distributed, it is open. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic

olivierlambert

No GFS2 (closed source)
No Xen live patching (until we do that ourselves because it's in Open Source Xen)

That's pretty much it.

Regarding the legal stuff, I know there is some specialized attorney, but we don't have the resources to start a legal war with Citrix. I don't know if EFF can help.

stormi

@revtel The version they released in 7.5 is still LGPL, they can't undo that. But if they own the code of a piece of software (all of it, which means they wrote it or that anyone who contributed to it signed a agreement to transfer the ownership of their code to Citrix), they can change the license of subsequent releases. So it's likely to be legal. Anyone else who'd make changes to the LGPL version would be bound by the license and have to release their work under the same license, but the primary copyright owner can do what they want.

AllooTikeeChaat

@stormi

Update both hosts from 7.5 to 7.6 Beta via yum

PVS accelerator looks to have survived the update.

Only bug so far .. XCP-Centre from the 7.6 servers is v7.5.0.

borzel

@allootikeechaat can you please test https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases/tag/v7.6.0-RC1
Many Thanks!

AllooTikeeChaat

@borzel

Thanks for the link.. no prob with the 7.6RC1 installer.

olivierlambert

Upgraded 3 physical hosts with yum (and XO), works like a charm!

stormi

@AllooTikeeChaat @borzel yum update should give you the latest RC version of XCP-ng Center, now.

hardman

@borzel

for information ! I have 4 servers different in hardware, installed the xcp-ng-7.5.0-2 version, used from localhost http://192.168.20.172/XCP-ng-Center.msi. I could connect to one as I could not to the other three. web XOA has connected to all 4 without errors. downloaded XCP-ng-Center-7.5.1.12, the problem remained.
Now I go to the forum, see link XCP-ng-Center-7.6.0.0-RC1 shake tested. All 4 servers are well connected !!!

borzel

@hardman hmmm .....

mpyusko

I have not tested the 7.6 beta yet, however When I just did an upgrade from XS 7.5 to XS 7.6 the upper-left corner retained XS 7.5 versioning, while the stats field and Xencenter/XCP-ng Center displayed 7.6. You may want to look into it.

stormi

@mpyusko it will fix itself automatically, some sort of cache.

mpyusko

@stormi it was persistent after reboot.

ecoutinho

Congrats on this release! I've done a 'yum update' on a XS 7.5 on a host with a Qlogic fibre channel HBA. It updated to 7.6 and the HBA works as expected. Qlogic management tools are useful if one wants to tweak HBA parameters or update its firmware. They are not needed for everyday usage.

borzel

XCP-ng Center 7.6 RC2
https://github.com/xcp-ng/xenadmin/releases/tag/v7.6.0-RC2

Please test and report back!

stormi

XCP-ng 7.6 RC1 is now available: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/488/xcp-ng-7-6-rc1-available