XCP-ng 8.3 updates announcements and testing

ph7

@gduperrey
Ran some test on my old i7 and it seems to work fine

bufanda

Did install on my lab pool

2 HP EliteDesk 800 G3 mini

One with i7 6700T, one with i5 6500T
Both 32GB RAM
iSCSI SR, NFS SR and local NVMe SR. VMs from all SR run. Migration during update worked. Migration of VMs after update worked. Backups (exporting VMs) is working
Didn't see any issue so far.

One thing the pool had the qcow2 patches installed since XAPI and sm packages gto updated I guess it won't support qcow2 at the moment right?

dthenot

@bufanda Hello,

There is equivalent sm packages in the qcow2 repo for testing, XAPI will be coming soon.
You can update while enabling the QCOW2 repo to get the sm and blktap QCOW2 version and get the XAPI version letter if you want.

bufanda

@dthenot No worries, just wanted to make sure I understand the expected behavior when I had the qcow2 patches installed.

dthenot

@bufanda You just need to make sure to have a sm and blktap qcow2 version.
Otherwise, having a normal sm version would drop the QCOW2 VDI from the XAPI database and you would lose VBD to VM aswell as name of VDI.
So it could be painful depending on how much you have
But in the case, you would install a non QCOW2 sm version, you would only lose the QCOW2 from DB, those would not be deleted or anything. Reinstalling a QCOW2 version then rescanning the SR would make them re-appear. But then you would have to identify them again (lost name-label) and relink them to VM.
We try to keep our QCOW2 version on top of the testing branch of XCP-ng but we could miss it

bufanda

@dthenot Only have 2 Test VMs currently not running with qcow2. Nothing production and nothing crucial. It's a lab pool. As I said just to understand the behavior when I test the new updates. But thanks for the details. Really appreciated

JeffBerntsen

Installed and working on my lab test machine, HP ProLiant DL165 G7 with AMD Opteron 6136 CPU and 32 GB of RAM.

Andrew

@gduperrey Installed and running on a few hosts. Good so far.

gduperrey

Updates published: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2025/07/03/july-2025-security-and-maintenance-update-for-xcp-ng-8-3-lts/

Thank you for the tests!