Windows Server 2025 on XCP-ng
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I have some more to add to this after playing with inplace upgrades:
Any VM that seems to have had Xen Tools 9.3.3 installed at some point (even if upgraded to 9.4 since) will fail to upgrade hanging on first reboot during the process. If the VM was created once 9.4 was the current stable release this is not an issue and the upgrade will run.
To fix this we need to totally remove all traces of XenTools drivers from the system
Before upgrading:
Open a command prompt as Administrator
cd "C:\Program Files\XenServer\XenTools" Run: uninstall.exe purge verboseReboot
Confirm Xen Management agent is not running via Xen Orchestra Console
Proceed with Server 2025 inplace Upgrade.
Once into Server 2025 you will need to run to Xen Tools MSI to reinstall the tools. It will detect the management agent is still present even though it is not running and the drivers have been removed, run though the uninstall process, reboot then install a clean copy of the latest available version of the tools.
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Thanks, that will probably save me an hour this summer if I decide to upgrade my production system. By then it might all be fixed.
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@Greg_E Interesting to read through when having performance issues on my end too albeit not running ADDS on windows server 2025. Did you decide to upgrade your production system?
I'm building a new Citrix multi session image but have found many things "not responding" e.g. file explorer slowness and just opening task manager. I could be having different issues to you all and would need to provide more detailed info but working through the forums here and on Microsoft end to see what I can find against this OS and how the rollout is going. Any feedback on Windows Server 2025 would be great here unless we have another more suitable thread to follow.
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I have not had the time to upgrade my servers yet, even in my lab I often fall back on 2022 because it's the old known thing at this point.
I do need to look into this though, I want to raise the domain/forest functional levels up to 2025 to see if that brings me anything when working with Win11. I'm really hoping they build a few more things (or put them back) into the GPO for win11, I'll probably find that they took more stuff out and put it into Intune.
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@Greg_E Thanks for the update Greg! OK will keep going on mine. I had found some issues with one of the file servers which the testing was using so that could have caused my speed issues. I reckon I'll do domain/forest later on too but bring in user facing 2025 desktops first. I'm getting rid of folder redirection with One Drive known folders in its place then will be able to investigate Intune after that for round 2 of desktop updates! Good luck on your end.
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@JL457 a coworker was telling me about Intune, if you run Config Manager, there are some settings to let them work together. Not sure exactly what needed to be done, but apparently ours is fixed and ready for someone to learn what's what. Our contract allows some stupidly larger number of clients to be using Intune.
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Due to the release of the Xentool 9.4.2, I once again tested whether the tools will start again without Delay. This was now the case with me. My XCP-NG test host now has 8.3 on it. That means: XCP-NG 8.3 with Xentools 9.4.2 and with Windows Server 2025 with AD role installed in this combination lead to me that the tools now can start correctly without the delay setting. But I cannot say whether the problem may have been fixed beforehand or whether XCP-NG 8.3 has an impact. I just wanted to let you know briefly because I didn't have it on my screen at the moment. So the initial reason of this thread seems fixed to me
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I have installed several Windows 11 24H2 in XCP-ng without any issues.
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@openaithedolphinshop-svg Hey, the original issue of this thread occured only with Server 2025 with AD role installed. Without AD role on it it worked already beforehand.
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It's likely that both Microsoft and Xen tools are a combination of the fix, I doubt XCP-ng has anything to do with this issue. And I never had time to check the XCP-ng Guest tools for Windows to see if this happened, but I'm guessing no or not tested. All my hosts are now on XCP-ng 8.3 and I don't see any point in testing 8.2 since it is EOL.
And that said, I'm no farther along in my Server 2025 testing, too many other things going on to think about it right now. If I have time I need to burn the vSphere portion of my lab down and install either Harvester HCI or Windows Server for Hyper-V. Broadcom is just (seemingly) going out of their way to prevent people like me (or us) from learning their products and using them in our labs to further that goal. I've explained this several times to VMUG Advantage managers, but they seem so tied up in clawing out some continuing relationships with Broadcom that they will not "rock the boat". I've said these things in Broadcom webcasts as well, always a run-around with no answers.
Sorry for the rant. All that said, eagerly awaiting XCP-ng 9, unfortunately I think the Alpha or Beta may wait until XO 6 is finished (just a guess). The updated kernel brings with it some storage changes that I really want to test, NFS nconnect=XX being one of them to see if I can get a little better performance to/from the disks. ESXi default was nconnect=4 and the VMs were slightly faster to/from their disks (all thin provisioned). The 4k "block" size and smaller is what I want to improve in all this.