@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.

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.

@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.

@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?"

For laughs I am testing with a VM that is powered off and its going, albeit slowly (likely due to a 10FDx port on the ESXi host).

This topic wasn't meant to focus on XCP-ng or XOA, but an entire ecosystem that is your network. While I routinely check my network for vulnerabilities and often am squashing said vulnerability XCP-ng is a different system entirely since it shouldn't be hardened by hand but by the developers through routine patching.

The question that I'm asking here is how does the Vates Team evaluate these vulnerabilities, Qualys, Greenbone, something else?

Is the Vates team open to the community reporting these vulnerabilities openly or would a ticket be best?

@irtaza9 said in XO High Availability:

AFAIK, Xen Orchestra (XO) is stateless and relies on Redis for database operations. What happens if my XO instance goes down?

• Will all users created in XO be removed?
• Will it erase all ACLs assigned to each user?
• Will it erase all self-service configurations?
• If we restart XO and reconfigure the pools, will it change the UUIDs of pools, hosts, or servers?
• Will existing VMs and their configurations remain intact, or will they need to be re-imported?
• Will the connection to XCP-ng hosts be lost, requiring manual reconfiguration?
• Does XO store any persistent data that needs to be backed up to prevent loss?
• If XO is restored from a backup, will it automatically reconnect to the existing XCP-ng infrastructure?
• How can we ensure high availability for XO to prevent disruptions?

Create a backup of your configuration via the backup tab (or manually) and export it somewhere safe.

You can then import the configuration on a new system and be back in the same working order.

@yzgulec said in XOA on a vSphere VM:

Hello,

I wonder if it is possible to install XOA on a VM hosted in vSphere ESXi. (Something similar to external vCenter)

Thank you.

Of course you could do this, you'd just import the appliance to your ESXi environment.

The question is why would you retain an ESXi environment? It's a bit silly given the pricing model that Broadcom has put out there.

Migrating to XCP-ng and XO can cost as little as 0 capex and only human capital to migrate from one hypervisor to the next.

XOA is installed on Debian, XO (from source or Community) can be easily installed into Debian or Ubuntu (both of which are free) and run completely fine on every hypervisor there is.

@cairoti said in Re-add a repaired master node to the pool:

@DustinB I use the open community version.

I think you should be fine to seize the master role, rebuild your second host and then as Olivier said in one of the links you posted, you have to scrub the old pool master. Though I'm not sure how that specific operation is performed.

@Tomcatter from Xen Orchestra I can't think of any way, but from the xe command line you likely could.

@cairoti Are you using Xen Orchestra (source of paid appliance)?

The process in the topic I listed would step you through the recovery of a standing up a new pool master.

@cairoti said in Re-add a repaired master node to the pool:

In the tests I performed, when shutting down the master node, the VMs running on it were also shut down and not migrated to the slave node.

Are you using shared storage between your master and slave servers? A NAS/SAN

@davealex8 Are you trying to pass a PCIe device into your XOA system rather than a guest on your XCP-ng host?

@kagbasi-ngc I think you'd have to configure some kind of log shipping ahead of time, I don't know that you'll be able to migrate the logs from one XO to another to keep things consistent.

@davx8342 That's a ton of storage, holy cow!

So two pools currently, 6 Servers 31TB Shared, and then 16 servers and 400TB Shared. I honestly don't know if there is an upper or lower limit to the amount of storage supported with XOStor, I'd imagine it would work but someone else would have to confirm.

@davx8342 All servers are Hyperconverged, every server for the entire history of servers.

To ask, how much storage is on your VXRail system today that is shared?
Could this not be better managed using your standard NAS/SAN providers like Synology, 3PAR etc?

I've not used XOStor, but since it's not fully supported on 8.3 yet I don't know that I would consider it feasible until it's fully supported.

Do you have a lot of VMs with more than 2TB of disk attached to each (just curious). I too would love for this to be gone lol.