XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha 🚀

stormi

@jhansen said in XCP-ng 8.3 public alpha :

Do you recommend any specific Xen-Tools version for Windows and Linux on XCP-NG 8.3?

On Linux, you can simply install/update the tools from the guest tools ISO that is included in XCP-ng. If you already have tools working, there's no emergency: they haven't changed much in a while, and the part that affects performance and drivers is directly included in your distro's Linux kernel already.

On Windows, use Citrix tools if you plan to enable Secure Boot. Otherwise, ours generally work well (except for Secure Boot due to an expired signature key), but haven't been updated in a while and may have some shortcomings on newer Windows. We're still in the process of searching for a developer to improve them.

jhansen

@stormi
Thank you.
At the moment all VMs are running with XCP-NG tools, including Windows (Win 10 and Server 2019)
I'm looking for the latest tools from Citrix and will then set up a 2022 Server. Should I enable "receive updates from Windows Update" or rather disable it ?
In the past, I often had problems that the Windows server no longer wanted to boot after some updates and then had to remove the updates manually.
It's only a test environment, but it should work after reboot

stormi

@jhansen If you want to use Citrix tools, you can enable it. This will only install the drivers, not the management agent, though.

jhansen

@stormi
Okay, I try
Thanks

JurgenDM

@stormi

Something I've noticed when trying Citrix Tools up to 9.2.2 that it breaks some parts of the network connections.
On xcp-ng 8.2 (not tested on 8.3) I've tried multiple times, Active Directory goes out of sync due to network issues and Windows 10 and 11 can no longer connect to truenas SMB shares.
I've not been able to pin point the root causes of the issue but it goes away when you uninstall the network driver.
I'm really hoping this sort of issues will be resolved in drivers provided by you guys.

olivierlambert

@JurgenDM if you have an active XCP-ng subscription, please create a ticket so we can prioritize some requests

JurgenDM

@olivierlambert

I'm just an home/hobby enthusiast who likes to play/test and learn these sorts of things.
So I cannot open a ticket, however if there is something I can contribute in the effort to be able to reproduce and solve the issue i'm happy to help.

olivierlambert

Stay tuned then, we'll publish a more recent version of the drivers at some point. We might have a dedicated profile this year (but this cost a lot, and it's hard to prioritize everything). Hope the best for us in terms of growth and we could deliver in every part of XCP-ng/XO

stormi

I just pushed a batch of updates to the 8.3/base repository.

You can update your 8.3 testing hosts with yum update, and reboot.

There isn't much on the side of user-visible changes, but this catches up with several months of changes made by both the XenServer team and us. Things are mostly evolving under the hood, so at this stage what matters is that the changes did not cause any regressions. Our internal test suite passed successfully.

Let's mention a few key changes from a very long changelog, though:

All latest security fixes
Performance optimizations in XAPI components. This means better performance for dom0 in various situations. This doesn't change the performance of VMs themselves, unless they are in situations where their performance was impacted by XAPI.
Basic vTPM support (no snapshots, no migration, no HA...). We haven't tested it yet so I can't guide you towards testing it yet.
Various fixes, as always.
Work on HTTPS support for all operations (for example storage migration) so that port 80 can be eventually closed. A lot was done, but I'm not sure it's complete yet.
Beginning of transition from python2 to python3: a few scripts ported to python3, and so python3 is now installed alongside python2 in dom0, and code will be ported progressively.
Various driver updates

cocoon

@stormi Hi, sounds great

I tried to use the vTPM Management and it seems for me that I am either missing updates (but I have even testing repo enabled) or the feature daemon is missing this entry:

restrict_vtpm

When I try to manage vTPM it generates this error on the server:
Raised Server_error(FEATURE_RESTRICTED, [ restrict_vtpm ])

Last added online I see Cloud:
https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp-featured/blob/master/bin/v6_server.ml#L68

Would be great to be able to configure it somehow, even add custom features in a config file, there already exists an similar issue entry for it:
https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/184

./var/log/xensource.log:Jan  9 16:13:55 xcp-ng-vm5 xapi: [error||1247 :::80|dispatch:VTPM.create D:6eb04e1f3871|backtrace] 1/9 xapi Raised at file ocaml/xapi/xapi_vtpm.ml, line 24

stormi created this issue in xcp-ng/xcp

open Configurable license daemon #184

stormi

@cocoon Thanks for the feedback. Let me summon @BenjiReis for the missing feature key.

gskger

@stormi Both host of my playlab are happy with the 73 patches applied by yum update and reboot . I assume that a rolling updated with XO would have worked as well

kaeptn

@stormi

Hello.
After applying the 73 patches there is a pending task:

xe task-list

uuid ( RO)                : 32fc65c5-3faa-ff27-662d-7cde2f630377
          name-label ( RO): xapi events
    name-description ( RO):
              status ( RO): pending
            progress ( RO): 0.000

It is still there after applying the most recent updates a day ago.
Progress stays at 0 forever.

stormi

@kaeptn I asked a XAPI developer who told me it's expected: it's the new way to watch over VM events from xenopsd to update the metadata". The positive counterpart is this removes a lot of spurious "INVALID_SESSION" errors from xensource.log caused by the former way of doing it.

stormi

There's a pending enhancement which might remove the task from the database and thus be more transparent.

stormi

@cocoon Could try with xcp-featured from the xcp-ng-testing repository? It should enable the feature.

yum update xcp-featured --enablerepo=xcp-ng-testing

cocoon

@stormi Works

stormi

Thanks @cocoon

So, I just pushed two updates to the 8.3 repositories, that you can get with a simple yum update:

xcp-featured, which enables partial vTPM support
guest-templates-json-*, which adds VM templates for RHEL 9 and derivatives.

cocoon

OK, TPM is visible in Windows Server 2022 but no secure boot atm.
Bios says it is disabled. Installed it in a virtual XCP-NG VM on ESXi.

stormi

@cocoon Did you enable Secure Boot on the VM, and did you also install SecureBoot certificates on your pool? (and if you installed the certificates to the pool after you first started the VM - with or without SB, you also need to install them to the VM by putting it in user mode: ~~varstore-sb-state user {VM-UUID}~~ varstore-sb-state {VM-UUID} user).