Has anyone been able to install Ubuntu 24.04 in VM from current official ISO? It seems that official ISOs (i.e. installer) still use unpatched kernel 6.8.0-22. Are there any newer ISO builds that I'm not aware of?

EDIT:
Sorry. False alarm. I screwed up my PXE settings. There was some leftover kernel and initrd images from beta versions of ISO. Kernel and initrd from latest ISOs work properly.

@olivierlambert Will 8.1 to 8.3 upgrade path also be supported?

@olivierlambert I would have never guessed that I sound so pessimistic ... I just wrote my experience... reality is sometimes harsh.

Glad to hear you are investing in dedicated people. With more people, a good team and being a company, you certainly have more leverage than independent volunteers like myself. Any road map you can share publicly?

@john-c

I feel your pain, however, the main difference between VMware support in Ansible and XenServer/XCP-ng is that VMware has a whole working group with a dozen of regular members and contributors:

https://github.com/ansible/community/wiki/VMware

Major contributors are all Red Hat or VMware employees i.e. people paid to do it. There is no such thing for XenServer/XCP-ng. Citrix never showed any interest in supporting Ansible. Netscaler is the only Citrix product that has a decent Ansible support.

To help you better understand how Ansible as a project works, here are some points from my personal adventure:

• To be able to contribute new modules to Ansible or any of the official collections, you need to implement extensive unit and integration tests. I understand the requirement. Ansible/Red Hat wants to maintain a high level of quality and to easily (and in automated way) detect any regressions. That's all good but implementing tests is harder and more work than implementing modules themselves. What's very very helpful in case of VMware is that there is a whole simulator called govcsim developed by VMware. You can test your modules against the simulator with ease and automate all the tests with little effort. To my knowledge, there is no simulator available for XenAPI. If such simulator does exist, it is most likely kept in secret by Citrix. If Citrix was ever to release this simulator, that would be a HUGE step forward.
• If you want to contribute new modules to Ansible or any of the official collections, someone has to review your code. Not many people are willing to do so and have the power to include your code to Ansible. As a matter of fact, finding reviewers and begging them for help is the hardest thing of all. I had some tremendous luck to acquire the interest of Abhijeet Kasurde, one of the top Ansible guys, to review my code and to eventually include xenserver_guest_* modules into Ansible. The guy handles VMware in Ansible... surprise! My xenserver_guest module was included without any unit or integration tests but for other modules I had to implement them. Luckily, they were simple and I had a luck to find a reviewer for tests also. When I wanted to upgrade xenserver_guest module with new functionality, they required unit and integration tests. I eventually implemented tests for xenserver_guest module but it was a huge undertaking and the amount of code involved easily dwarfed the module itself. I basically ended up implementing a barebone XenAPI simulator. This is where I hit a road block. No one, even the people that initially supported me, wanted to review this monstrosity of test+simulator. It was never included in Ansible.
• If you don't want to rely on external reviewers then you have to form a team, or if possible, a work group. That way you can review each others code and include it in Ansible without external support. Everything is pretty much handled by bots. If you gain a high enough status in Ansible project, you could get permissions to merge the code yourself without relying on anyone, not even bots. Should I mention that I failed to ever find any good Python programmer that is into Ansible and interested enough to form a team with me?
• You can skip all this struggle if you just maintain you own collection of modules but then you cannot rely on existing Ansible tooling that will do all the testing, linting, sanity checks, spell checks and such. You are on your own.

After a lot of struggle I eventually lost any interest as I was wasting a lot of time and life had to go on. Not much people showed interest in xenserver_guest_* Ansible modules either. My employer also ditched XenServer/XCP-ng in favor of VMware a few years back. Even with all the Broadcom/VMware situation, we got a super good deal with Broadcom because of our deployment size and commitment so we are sticking with VMWare.

All in all, if Ansible support for XenServer/XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra on par with VMware support is ever to see the light of day, these prerequisites are required:

• Publicly available XenAPI simulator is a must
• A working group of at least three people with knowledge in Python, Ansible and XenAPI committed to the cause
• Possibly corporate and financial backing by Citrix, Vates? or some other third party

Having any official Ansible support for XenServer/XCP-ng was (and is) a miracle to this day. A miracle I was blessed with and a huge learning experience for me.

Sorry for the long post. It is not my intention to discourage people but I think everyone should understand why XenServer/XCP-ng does not enjoy better Ansible support. There is much much more to it than just having a willingness to do anything.

XCP-NG / xen guest tools support network configuration through guest agent but for Windows guests only:

https://www.citrix.com/community/citrix-developer/citrix-hypervisor-developer/citrix-hypervisor-developing-products/citrix-hypervisor-staticip.html

or even better, the original article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180218110151/https://xenserver.org/blog/entry/set-windows-guest-vm-static-ip-address-in-xenserver.html

Using the same mechanism (XAPI->xenstore), an agent for *nix guest can be implemented too. Unfortunately, no one has stepped in for that job. Citrix seems to be uninterested. I have a basic idea how to implement the agent but I lack free time to do so.

Just to confirm. After copying new install.img to my PXE environment, unattended installation went smoothly with my answer file.

@stormi So is install.img the only thing changed in ISO or is there some changes to rpm packages?

@Ced76 "register" is not a module parameter. It's Ansible task parameter. Take a look at Ansible documentation for registered variables:

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_variables.html#registering-variables

Basically what "register: deploy" does is that is says "define a variable called deploy and put a return value of the module in it". A return value of the module in this case are numerous VM facts you can find in "deploy.instance" (sub)variable. Registered variable is accessible in any subsequent task of the same play. Also "deploy" here is just a random name chosen. You can name your registered variables however you like.

@jedimarcus Network configuration (IP, subnet, gateway) only works for Windows guests because there is proper support for it in XenServer Guest Tools for Windows. There is no such support (as far as I know) in XenServer Guest Tools for *nix based systems. Unlike tools for Windows, tools for *nix based systems only contain a few xenstore tools and a daemon (xe-daemon) that collects OS metrics. There is no management agent.

My idea is to write a proper agent for *nix based systems at some point but it won't be any time soon. Maybe Citrix (or Vates ?) will implement one before I do.

For now, you can use custom based network configuration trough xenstore and custom scripts. It's described in Notes section of the module documentation.

A milestone has been achieved . All of my modules have been merged upstream. I've updated the first post with new info.

That will most probably be all for Ansible 2.8. I'm keeping some improvements and possibly more modules for Ansible 2.9. Currently, I'm thinking about what other modules could be useful so I could implement them. Any suggestion or wish would be much appreciated.

First post has been updated with new info. Another module has been merged upstream. Also some bugs were fixed.

@jthompson333 No problem. I'm following both forums so I'll try to respond same day.

@desnudopenguino Thanks .

I've updated the first post with some more info and clarified some confusing stuff.

@Ruskofff said in Ansible and XCP-ng:

I have a question about your module "xenserver_guest". Is it able to modify settings of the VM ? My main interest will be to mount the guest-tools.iso file to the VM. It's easy with the xe cli but I can't test it now that why I'm asking this.

Of course. Check out "cdrom" module parameter in the docs.

@Ruskofff I've updated the thread with new info regarding my modules.

The biggest advantage to using the modules instead of using xe tool or calling XAPI methods is that modules follow Ansible's idempotency principle. So you can run your Ansible playbooks multiple times without worrying that Ansible will do anything more times than expected.

@Ruskofff said in Ansible and XCP-ng:

Edit : I found the Ansible module you talking about @cheese (with the other topic talking about Ansible on XenServer). I could start from this point for the deployment of VM yes. Seems good for me !

This is the thread:

https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/159/deploy-vms-using-ansible

I'm the author of the module. The thread is a little outdated but I will update it ASAP. Feel free to ask me anything regarding the module.

@BitSprocket Hi. Thanks for stopping by. Info in the first post is a little outdated. I'll update it soon. The main thing is that my Ansible module for deployment of VMs is now merged in upstream Ansible so you should just get development version of Ansible to get access to my module. Feel free to ask me anything here. I'll be glad to help you get it up and running.

UPDATE: I've updated the first post with fresh info.

Hi everyone. For anyone interested in testing, GitHub repo is now updated with latest commit that includes fixes for a number of bugs including a bug that effectively prevented deployment of new VMs. Also, the module is now based on the latest Ansible 2.8 devel code base.

As always, any testing feedback would be very much appreciated, good or bad.

Thanks stormi. Still no testers thou. I found one critical bug that effectively prevents deployment . Reconfiguration of existing VMs works as expected . I have prepared a commit to fix a bunch of bugs I found in the mean time but I haven't pushed it to GitHub repo yet. To lazy I guess . If someone is eager to test, I'll push it right away.

So did anyone have a chance to test the module? I need some feedback (good, bad, anything...) if module is to be included as an official Ansible module. Lack of external testers is currently a show stopper .