I don't know of anything to keep it from deactivating but usually Microsoft will let you reactivate if you call thier support line. This has happened to me several times. Ive found they will let you reactivate at least three times. IDK if thats still the case though. This was years ago

Re: Backup VM with hardware passthrough

Sorry for reviving an old post but is backup possible with a USB passthrough on XCP-NG 8.3? or at least a snap shot?

I had to just play around with it and see what happens, I feel like I watched videos explaining it fairly good but I you are right. Theres tons of options and they keep adding more which is nice. Just makes understanding whats happening a little more challenging. If you have hardware for it spin up a test lab and try it out.

@CodeMercenary I use the paid for XOA and it backups up its config to the cloud so it wouldn't be a problem for me to restore. You can easily set something like that up by backing up to a store location then having that backup to a cloud storage location.

As far as having the XO instances running Im not sure how that would work. I know with NBD storage you should be able to connect to the hard drive with multiple XO's (I think) but the problem I ran into quickly was the fact that when I made a backup using my XOA, the XO from source would see it as a backup without an associated job. If you had three XO's running with 3 different remote storage locations I don't think you'd have a problem with that. Instead you might run into the XO's seeing the 3 different backup jobs running , 2 of which, they don't know about.

I use XOA to backup to a different storage array, then I have that storage backup to the cloud. My backups aren't really up to "standard" but thats all I can do for now. My plan is to make backups to a different storage pool on the same central storage I run my VM's on, back that whole unit up to an off site unit with ZFS replication, then back that backup to the cloud with StorJ. Right now Ive just got the one backup on the same Storage server and the StorJ.

I do this but its not so that I can have an exact copy of the XOA. I just use it in the rare event I want to modify my XOA like give it more core or more ram. Its easy enough to spin up a community edition XO and then use it to add remove resources, Also I keep my XOA and my XO from source on different host in case one goes down. Nice easy lazy way of still being able to manage my VM's

I don't know of anything to keep it from deactivating but usually Microsoft will let you reactivate if you call thier support line. This has happened to me several times. Ive found they will let you reactivate at least three times. IDK if thats still the case though. This was years ago

I would run it in Scale if i were you. Ive read about people's set ups like this and there hasn't been any issues with it but It has been argued that virtualization of your storage underneath a hypervisor is dangerous. I don't know what type of pitfalls you might encounter with this but it will surely make recovery from a disaster a little more complicated. And with Scale being able to run VM's you can have the GPU passed through to your Win11 machine.

I presume you are transcoding in your Jellyfin? I use Plex and I pass through a GPU to it (but thats in esxi). Can you pass through your GPU to multiple devices to use for that? I know there is vGPU but I don't know if it can be used for transcoding. It would be interesting to try though

I read a forum post about some of the xo community editions having issues with that. Something to do with invalid certificates or something. Did it ever fail or did it just stay at 0 forever?

Oh, I didn't know you tried using virtual box to do an export. I haven't tried that before.

I cdon't know about a guide anywhere to set it up but I can say that there is definitely nothing wrong with running two XO instances. I have XOA and an XO community edition running in the same pool. I always make sure if I am about to do a big change that my XOA and my XOCE are on different hosts. And tbh its mostly because Im not as comfortable in the CLI with xe commands. But there were at least two times where this came in handy. Especially during my initial build stage as I broke everything twice. the XOCE saved me from having to try and start over on my XOA.

As far as I know you can't "sync" them. You can however pull a config off one and restore it to another one. You just have to remember to do that anytime you make changes to XO. Also you don't want two XO's with backup jobs enabled. Another downside is that if you give them both all the same resources it will look like there are errors in your backups. I vaguely remember it saying "Backup for VM found but no associated job was found" or something. Innocuous error but annoying none the less.

How did you export it? I used the Vmware export tool on Esxi 6.5 and none of those exports worked for me. I ended up having to use clonezilla and it was able to make an OVA that worked.