If I had my choice, Prevent Migration is more understandable.

Disable Migration, while it means the same thing, doesn't naturally come out of the English language.

@olivierlambert I was able to sort out the issue, it has to do with licensing and the fact that we aren't licensed to with "Live Migration" for this ESXi host.

Essentially this inquiry is solved.

@TechGrips While I can understand the desire to use removable USB as a Backup Repo, I would highly discourage it.

Managing and rotating USB drives is a pain, if they go to sleep, it's a pain, if they fail it's a pain, if you forget to rotate your drives, it's a pain.

I personally can understand the desire to do so, it's cheap and relatively affective if you can deal with these risks, however so is just using any NFS or SMB share and then having a replication script that could write to your USB, which you could then rotate. Separating your XCP-ng hosts, XO, and your backups is of critical importance because if you have any sort of server room environmental issues or failure, you're risking loosing everything.

XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, while they do offer a ton of flexibility, there is obviously trades-offs to using less than ideal components, such as external USB drives as your primary backup repository.

If you really want to insist on using USB drives, you'll have to attach the drives to your host and then pass them through to your XO installation, which when you want to rotate those drives you'll have to update your Backup jobs within XO and confirm that your XO VM has the proper access to the drives. This seems like a lot of complexity for very little financial benefit.

Separately I think you're taking your own frustrations out on the community, because of a lack of understanding in the tooling that you testing in comparison to ESXi where you'd attach a USB drive directly, perform your backup, remove the disk and attach another.

I get that ESXi can make things "simple" but simple isn't always better.

HTH

The reason you wouldn't want to look at XO for this from a technical standpoint is because XO works at the hardware level of the hypervisor, dolling out resources to different VMs and creating backups.

You need to look at the content within a given VM and compare the file system difference from points A and B.

Only something that is operating within the file system would be able to readily tell you "Something has changed".

Odds are you have a user or several who are dumping files onto a share that they shouldn't be, or are replicating some cloud service to keep a copy on your server etc.

@flakpyro said in How to migrate XOA itself?:

@DustinB Are the any downsides to having two XOA instances pointing at the same pool? Since the config itself is stored at the pool level im guessing theres no downside?

IE: Priimary XOA running in core DC and secondary XOA running at your DR site. Is it just a matter of adding the pool on the secondary XOA and it downloads the existing config or did you need to do a full export / import?

If you import your configuration, each XO instance will think they should be running the backups as far as I've noticed. If I have two instances running with the same configuration, I simply disable the backup jobs on one of them.

The config file is just an XML that contains your existing instance. You can import it to any new XO instance and have the same exact configuration.

@yzgulec there really isn't any hard-fast rules to aligning CPU to vCPU. A Guest is going to need cores to operate no matter what.

If you're trying to min-max your CPU utilization for a given system, you might want to target the guest to use between 70-80% of it's vCPU all of the time.

This is all a part of system tuning and is always a shifting target, as CPU is shared among all VMs and DOM0.

As you increase the number of guests on a host, the CPU consumption will be increased, which means you may need to scale back on the vCPU a given VM has.

@stormi said in XSA-468: multiple Windows PV driver vulnerabilities - update now!:

Do others share this feeling and have this question after re-reading the whole announcement?

No it's pretty clear, update the drivers on everything as all versions are susceptible.

@olivierlambert I agree wholeheartedly with you on that. Keeping the system stock is best for support.

Separately, is there any planned work on officially integrating support for Uninterruptable Power Supplies and XCP-ng 8.3?

A question

• Have you clicked into the console screen before hitting F12?

You can disable all of the boot devices in the Advanced section of the VM, try disabling the HDD

Disable the Boot options if your system is making it past POST to quickly so you can get into the Guests BIOS.

@jasonnix said in A question for the creators of XO:

Hi @olivierlambert,
No, I'm not a bot. I asked it because I need your experiences. I want to make a panel for Xen.

So you know how to program with PHP and Ruby and not with Javascript, so the question is really "Why can't this be rewritten so I can help?"

@acebmxer Using performance mode should migrate your VM's so all systems are equally "performant" the different modes are outlined here https://docs.xcp-ng.org/management/vm-load-balancing/

As to why your VMs not migrate, I would only be guessing - anyways my guess is that it only polls the system every so often and if your systems are performing well enough nothing gets moved...

@firefly because the underlying hardware that the VM has registered has likely changed, maybe substantially.

A sysprep has the Windows system go through and validate what it's hardware is, it removes hardware specific drivers namely, but it does other stuff too.

sysprep on windows is also sometimes required, but will require that you reactive the OS with it's product key.

@firefly said:

Why would it take 30 minutes to boot a Windows ESXi 8.0.3 imported VM in XOA on the first boot?

Did you remove the ESXi drivers from the VM before migrating it to XCP-ng?

And to really round this out, the MTBF for any of these is in the millions of hours (1.2-3M), that's a use time of 136.968 - 342.46 years respectively.

Basically, if a drive dies, just replace it no matter what, but in the end the reliability of these drives is meant to outlast all of us.

Unless you actually need some specific function provided in some form-factor or model, don't bother.

@Greg_E The MTBF for Enterprise Hard drive, Enterprise SSD and Consume SSDs really falls into "it doesn't matter" category IMO.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data
https://www.serverstor.com/samsung-pm9a3-vs-990-pro-enterprise-vs-consumer-ssd-showdown/
https://www.ontrack.com/en-au/blog/kingston-blog-enterprise-and-client-ssds-compared-part-2

Since most hypervisors aren't getting slammed constantly with read/writes ops even something like a "decent" consumer set of SSDs will last effectively as long as the Enterprise Hard Drives if not slightly longer.

The break down above really helps to explain it all.

Enterprise HDDs -1.2-1.5 million hours between failure
Enterprise SSDs - 2-3 million hours between failure
Consumer SSDs - 1.2 - 2 million hours between failure

Unless you expressly need some specific feature of Enterprise hardware (ECC Ram etcera) why spend more on it?

It's slower, as costly if not just more/less than the SSD comparable, adds risks during recovery time after a failure (because it's slower to rebuild an array on spinning rust).

Really the only things I would consider today would be Enterprise SSDs or Consumer SSDs.

@ShaneNP said:

I just setup a fresh demo install (fresh empty XCP-NG) on a laptop w/ a NAS for ISO/VM/Backup, and thought I would give XO 6 a go...and the first thing I needed was a Storage Repository...where does one add that in XO 6? in XO 5 +New > Storage.

I am not seeing anything to add one, figured I would post here, because its a new interface, I might be 100% blind to it.

It's likely not functional in XO6 atm, I'd just default to using XO5 for the infrastructure setup and then you can test the XO6 interface out as your daily driver

@cg It looks like you're using XCP-ng center (or some other solution), if you pass the USB through XO do you still have the same issue?

@Greg_E For only 6TB usable, why would you use spinning rust? Get SSD, the price delta is going to be minimal and the performance and reliability will be far higher.

@nikade said in Every virtual machine I restart doesn't boot.:

@DustinB yeah im guessing the VDI isn't attached to the VM for some reason, based on the screenshot.

Im also wondering if he ever rebooted the VM's after installing them with PXE

Right, it's a likely answer... but even then I would've expected his PXE server to just restart the installation process all over again... assuming that the disk is attached to the VM etc and that PXE boot isn't disabled automatically like it is with an ISO after first boot.

haha