stormi said in XCP-ng 8.0.0 Beta now available!:

You could test with Citrix Hypervisor and then report it at https://bugs.xenserver.org
Maybe they'll want to investigate even if the hardware is not officially supported. If someone can reproduce the issue on supported hardware, that would make things easier.

Though I doubt it was woth the effort, as the support over there is well known (especially for not supported configurations etc.) I did it - for the reason of trying to improve stuff (and giving back to OSS community):
https://bugs.xenserver.org/projects/XSO/issues/XSO-955

stormi dd stands for disk dump and does exactly that: Copy a stream of data.
Fio however can be configured for precise workloads and read/write mixes, parallel workloads etc.

So the first thing will only give you streamline benchmarks, what almost nobody cares about.
The second can simulate realworld (VM/database...) workloads, where (controller) Caches and non magnetic storage (Flash, Optane, MRAM...) makes the real difference.
Also use big amount of data, since caches can impact small ones extremely. Don't get me wrong: We need them and they can make huge differences, but as long as your benchmarks fully fit into them, it gives your nonsense/fake results. Also (consumer) SSDs start throttling after some 10 to a very few 100 GB of data written. Their caches fill up and they 'overheat'.

You can spend days on benchmarks and how to do what.

The problem is still persistent or exisiting again.

Exactly: You can use ALT GR once and get the symbol you need (@ |...) but afterwarts it's just putting weird symbols into the console.
Dirty fix: Change the tab to whatever (general, stats...) and and back to console.

Still pretty annoying and kicked me out of one of my servers for some time (thx fail2ban...).

https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-5-36/

The part about ZFS:

As there are many possibilities during the creation of a ZFS storage repository, you still need to use the command line (eg. zpool create zdata /dev/sdb) to create your SR.

Check this documentation for more information about ZFS SR creation.

Once the SR is created, you will have the option to select it during the SR creation directly in Xen Orchestra.

Since it's confusing and technically wrong, it should rather be something like:

As there are many possibilities during the creation of a ZFS storage repository, you still need to use the command line (eg. zpool create zdata /dev/sdb) to create a ZFS pool before creating the corresponding SR.

Check this documentation for more information about ZFS SR creation.

Once the ZFS pool is created and mounted, you will have the option to select the mountpoint during the SR creation directly in Xen Orchestra.

...and this forum is missing a "quote" button, as formating text in codeboxes doesn't work (and tags don't survive a linebreak, you have to mark it every line again).

Regards,
Christof

olivierlambert
Okay, so bascially what I (and other people, I know, who are in a similar environment) need:

• Tape backup is mandatory, as we're talking about (deduplicated, compressed) dozens of TB
• Deduplication and good compression: duplicated, uncompressed ends in PB
• All of that needs to scale! E.g. Commvault scales on 16 threads here even with only 1 - 2 tasks. (Can't say if even more without upgrade of CPU)
  (We need chains, of course, to go B2D2T -> dumping the dedup-store on tape as disaster recovery)
• Applicationawareness (which can be done via agent - agentless is not always king or very important):
  -- MS Exchange, recovering datastores, mailboxes and even single mail items
  -- SQL Servers: MS SQL, MySQL (MariaDB)...
  -- Windows Active Directory Items

Over here I also need to have the option to do backups only inside the VM via agent, as I can't snapshot them.
You might have gotton me wrong: AFAIK quiesced backups always made a VM snapshot and submitted the request also to the VSS writer and then the VM/VHDs have been "read". In this case it will always fail, as there's no space on storage for such. Also Citrix discontinued that in their VM tools! XCP-ng yet lacks a proper tool maintenance with corresponding releases, which would be the only chance to keep that.

As an idea for XOA:

• Make it run on physical hardware, as VMs are too small for such
• You already cooperate with HPE - let them run bare metal on ProLiants!
• ZFS(oL) Could be your way to go to implement dedup and compression

...feel free to add, comment... whatever.

Citrix also has a long history of problematic VM guest-tools. Race conditions with broken drivers, unbootable VMs, broken agents... It's a pain in the a**.
If you like your VMs: Always make a snapshot of every VM before updating the tools.

Is known why they remove the VSS-functionality? I don't get why they remove features (again).

XCP-ng already ate a bunch of time, and I'm sure it'll continue for testing etc
I'm Sysadmin with very limited coding ability - I'm definately out for that.

I guess it would need someone being good at C#.NET. Also XAPI would probably need to know about it (what may already be, as you're implementing it into XOA)...

First rule of all benchmarks: The longer and more often they run, the more precise they are.
If we talk about 1G as base, why should I switch with 10 or 100 to M? That doesn't make any sense at all.

maxcuttins did you really measure 10 and 100 MB after I said 1 G is not enough for accurate results?

Usually you set blocksize to something usefull, like 1M and set count to e.g. 10000.
Of course you can change blocksize to test a bit, but that's usually between like 64k and maybe 4M.

nikade It's also RAS. The risk of a 2nd failing disc during rebuild is a lot higher than usual.
Our B2D2T server needs about 24 hours for that.

nikade I found out the HPE MSA2060 has a full flash bundle option, wich is suprisingly cheap, so our SAN has 3.84 TB SAS SSDs - they'll be good within a few hours, but our backup server has a RAID6 with 10 TB HDDs.

nikade It's also RAS. The risk of a 2nd failing disc during rebuild is a lot higher than usual.
Our B2D2T server needs about 24 hours for that.

olivierlambert said in First SMAPIv3 driver is available in preview:

Hi,

8.3 release is eating a lot of resources, so that's the opposite: when it's out, this will leave more time to move forward on SMAPIv3

Lots of work means lots of changes, means: I'm exciting about it. Also sounds more like a 9.0, if that much work is going into it.

hsnyder AFAIK every - even not so - modern RAID controller can do 'verification read', 'disk scrubbing' or however they call it. It won't fix bitrot with single parity, but it can fix a single and detect dual bit failures.
That's why the only option for our SAN is: RAID6 respectively any DP algorythm.

Paolo If it's only for that: Any HW-RAID with DP should do the job. (in case you don't fully go for SW-RAID)

bufanda mostly RAM is "required" if you go for things like online-deduplication, as that needs to be handled within the RAM.
I configured our servers to 12 GB memory for dom0 anyways, as it helps with the overall performance. 3 GB can be pretty tight if you have a bunch of VMs running.
IIRC generally rather 8 are recommended nowadays. (unless you have a rather small environment)

olivierlambert I know the problem of a shared FS, the quesion I had was rather: does qcow2 or vhdx have benefits above each other. What are pros/cons with the choice of one.
Does it matter at all?

@still_at_work the question is technically wrong. It's less depending on SMAPI, moreso on the "drivers" that it'll be able to use.
Someone needs to implement something for thin provisioned shared storage that could handle it.
e.g. via GFS2 or something else.

You could make your own "adapter"/"driver" (I forgot how they called it) for it, like they did with ZFS.

@john-c as well as FC. Basically all shared storages that are production ready.

What are the up/downsides of qcow2 vs. VHDX?

ThierryC01 said in XCP-ng Windows PV Drivers 8.2.2:

Why is there no video drivers for Windows, I have a Windows 10 Pro VM and the video lags a bit compared to my Linux Desktop VMs despite having 8GO RAM and 16MO (?16 max???) video memory.

Because it's rudimentary GFX and has no acceleration at all. It's not made for what you might expect.