Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems

crazyadm1n

XCP-NG support/licensing ended up being too expensive for us to justify it. We would have been paying about the same amount as we were paying for VMWare before the price hike.

To get the multiyear pricing you have to pay for all those years up front. VMWare did not have a same restriction pre price hike.

archw

@fakenuze

In the FWIW department, I've now done four sites. Network thing I mentioned above took about an hour to figure out and was a bit confusing. Once I did one (and made a little cheat sheet on how I did it), the rest of the sites were easy.

Arch

rfx77

Our three main problems are:

snapshots snapshots snapshots

just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.

nikade

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

Our three main problems are:

snapshots snapshots snapshots

just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.

We switched from iSCSI to NFS and never looked back, the performance is pretty good, thin provisioning, snapshots coalescale pretty fast and life is good.
The setup is rather easy as well as there is no need to tweak the XCP's multipathing configuration.

john.c

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

Our three main problems are:

snapshots snapshots snapshots

just a pain on a thick lvm iscsi sr.

Thin based SRs are recommended for a reason as they give better performance and also take up less storage space. You can get really good performance if using NFS 4.0 or higher (best when done using NFS 4.2 and using pNFS to its fullest extent).

With full flash storage target using NFS 4.2 and pNFS to its fullest extent and you'll have the capacity to benefit from features which have been developed, specifically to be paired with SSD storage.

olivierlambert

Also CBT might help to reduce the coalesce work needed in general.

rfx77

@john-c
NFS is no solution compared tu fast iSCSI Storage. To get in the performance-range of out ISCSI Flashsystem you have to buy Netapp which costs you three times as much.

If you have to pay this much for a storage to get the same faetures as before you can stay on vmware.

nikade

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

@john-c
NFS is no solution compared tu fast iSCSI Storage. To get in the performance-range of out ISCSI Flashsystem you have to buy Netapp which costs you three times as much.

If you have to pay this much for a storage to get the same faetures as before you can stay on vmware.

Does your current storage support NFS?
If yes, you should give it a try and atleast benchmark it, maybe you'll be suprised.

rtjdamen

@rfx77 use cbt backups and no coalesce and snapshot issues anymore.

rfx77

@nikade No our current storage does not support nfs. but which enterprise grade-storage beside top end Netapp and Dell PowerStor really do??

rfx77

@rtjdamen

CBT is not supported wit CommVault
CBT is Beta in XO

Other Backup vendors cannot compete when you have a broad spectrum of Agent needs.

john.c

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

@nikade No our current storage does not support nfs. but which enterprise grade-storage beside top end Netapp and Dell PowerStor really do??

The TrueNAS storage products either the physical TrueNAS hardware products from iXSystems or using TrueNAS Scale download installation on a server of your own choosing. The recent release of TrueNAS Scale 24.04.2 is likely to really do well as SR for XCP-ng. It's performance is second to none and also will protect data integrity and also can do both SCSI and NFS.

https://www.truenas.com/truenas-scale/
https://www.truenas.com/f-series/
https://www.truenas.com/m-series/
https://www.truenas.com/r-series/

rfx77

@john-c

I would not compare TrueNAS to IBM, HP, Dell, Netapp,... I have never seen this as a serious storage backend for VmWare or HyperV in a mission-critical environment. And today i have to say that you find this types of environmets in all customer sizes.

TrueNAS is also way more expensive than any IBM FlashSystem

john.c

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

@john-c

I would not compare TrueNAS to IBM, HP, Dell, Netapp,... I have never seen this as a serious storage backend for VmWare or HyperV in a mission-critical environment. And today i have to say that you find this types of environmets in all customer sizes.

TrueNAS is also way more expensive than any IBM FlashSystem

Your rather mistaken as there's a wide variety of US Fortune 500 companies and the US Government which use TrueNAS in their organisations. Additionally Vates is using a TrueNAS instance in their infrastructure!

Also you don't have to use their hardware products you can roll your own TrueNAS by installing it on a compute server originally produced by another company.

https://www.truenas.com/virtualization/
https://www.truenas.com/clients/
https://www.truenas.com/case-studies/
https://www.truenas.com/h-series/

olivierlambert

You sound a bit grumpy today @rfx77

rtjdamen

@rfx77 there are several other options, alike a3 is one good agentless solution that runs xcp-ng cbt backups. XOA is allready having in beta and is focussing on getting 100%, we run our backups on cbt and it seems to work allrwsdy very good. Coalesce with cbt is almost instant.
I know Nakivo is also planning on adding xcp-ng to there solution kn the near future.

rfx77

@olivierlambert

Sorry for that but i am fighting to tune and get backup right for nearly a week now and it is hard to find a real 100% solution. the migration from vmware gives us lots of headaces because of tight storage space and the snapshot problematic

olivierlambert

CBT will be helpful for you, as @rtjdamen said

rfx77

@olivierlambert
Yes. Unfortunately i dont think that CommVault will add this feature if i request it. And from a bigger perspective where Xen is only on part of many there is no other option for us where we use it today.

For smaller customers we are already evaluating XO with CBT for the VM backups + CommVault Agents in the VM (like others do with veeam)

But we are not entirely convinced that Xen will be our one-fits-all solution for our customers. maybe it will be a combination of hyperv and xenserver/xcp-ng

john.c

@rfx77 said in Switching to XCP-NG, want to hear your problems:

@olivierlambert
Yes. Unfortunately i dont think that CommVault will add this feature if i request it. And from a bigger perspective where Xen is only on part of many there is no other option for us where we use it today.

For smaller customers we are already evaluating XO with CBT for the VM backups + CommVault Agents in the VM (like others do with veeam)

But we are not entirely convinced that Xen will be our one-fits-all solution for our customers. maybe it will be a combination of hyperv and xenserver/xcp-ng

If you don't try asking (or requesting) CBT support of XCP-ng being added from CommVault then you won't know for sure (let alone get). They have support for CBT on other hypervisors, so thus they do have CBT support generally. Thus they just need to add support for CBT on XCP-ng (via XO) in CommVault products. Xen Orchestra has recently on XOA latest channel added CBT.