@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:

If you don't see the value, then I failed to convince you. But it doesn't mean there's no value.
It's like you missed the entire point of the article: support is FAR more than just having assistance when you have a problem. Did you really read it?

No, I didn't miss it. In your standard support offering there is nothing proactive. There is nothing about setup assistance or anything. There is only send-us-an-email-and-we'll-get-back-to-you-the-next-business-day.

Or is there more to it that isn't on the homepage?

@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:

Not understand why paying for a core software running literally your company is a bit beyond me

That's why I wrote my post, trying to fix that problem for you. You wanted feedback on your blog post. I truly want the xcp-ng project to succeed.

The problem isn't that someone doesn't want to pay. The problem is what the seller is offering something that isn't valuable enough to motivate the cost or is only offering something that the buyer doesn't want or need.

And the value of something is in relation to every other solution to the problem.

So my old workplace wasn't paying for support by giving money away on a support contract, but they were paying for support by employing staff that could manage their systems. They also commissioned work from open source developers from time to time. And I'm sure they would have been glad to pay for incident based support - if ever needed.

@olivierlambert said in My vision for Open Source pro support:

A relatively (longer than I expected) article where I share about my vision of Open Source support:

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/05/06/my-vision-for-open-source-pro-support/

If you have comments or reactions, feel free to share here

From a business point of view I have a hard to time seeing the value proposition.

Fixed price support per host may support customer success but not really in this case. Compare for example to MSPs that deploy open source all the time. They manage your service/systems/software for you so you don't have to. With a fixed price you know exactly what you're getting. The customer goals and the MSPs goals are completely aligned.

That is not the case here because with a standard support contract for xcp-ng you are actually not getting anything. So there is zero value - unless you have a problem you can't solve yourself. Then there is some value.

My old workplace had about 20 xcp-ng hosts. We haven't needed any support in the last five years. I'm sure we would not have payed 5 x 20 x 600 EUR = 60,000 EUR because someday we might need some support. The value just isn't there.

You probably have different type of customers and they value different things. So support options would need to be different to appeal to different customers - if you want their business.

For example I'm pretty sure there are a lot of customers out there that want managed services. They want their virtualization hosts to be patched and running as they should.

@olivierlambert said in Managing different locations from one XO?:

The code is open source but you need to install it and configure it yourself (if you are using XO from Github)

OK, that makes sense.

@olivierlambert said in Managing different locations from one XO?:

Hi!

1. No problem. If you don't want to use a VPN, you can rely on XO Proxy to act as a "host" proxy in each site.
2. That's also why using XO proxy is great because it mean backup traffic will stay on the same network/site where your proxies are.
3. Only backup/export/replication traffic will flow through XO or a proxy, not VM migration nor anything else.

Thanks! Is the proxy open source as well?
Is it a standalone appliance or how is it deployed in each location?

OK, it looks like it's a VM and it's deployed remotely from XO - if you have a license.
https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/proxy.html#architecture

We're refreshing our hardware and looking at different options how to manage our xcp-ng hosts.

Is there a problem having XO manage xcp-ng hosts in different datacenters over VPN links?

What data traffic is passing through the XO instance except actual commands? Backups? VM migration?

@gangsterrapper22 said in Smartmontools:

@Pete-S I have compiled a RPM for nvme-cli. I can share it to you if you want to test it. Currently I don't have a nvme to test it, but the command "nvme" works in CLI.

@olivierlambert Should I also share the RPM to you, that you can upload it for testing, if you are interested in it?

That's great! And yes, I'd like to test it. I have two hosts with enterprise nvme drives where I will run xcp-ng.

Should really have nvme-cli in xcp-ng as well.

Smartmontools 6.5 has experimental nvme support but nvme-cli is the native tool for it.