@Andrew It's interesting because I actually had one of the previous versions of the OVA running in XCP and now that VM halts in the same place so it appears something changed on the XCP-NG side.
@olivierlambert I was able to get the import working by importing into vmware workstation, exporting to ovf and then converting to ova with vmwares command line tool.
@Andrew That's what I thought, but basically wanted confirmation. Are there any settings to look at that may be able to be tuned in XCP to improve responsiveness?
If you want to login manually without any SSH key, you have to add a password for the account (passwd). Then you can log in with your Debian user with this password.