@stormi said in XCP-ng 8.0.0 Beta now available!:

You could test with Citrix Hypervisor and then report it at https://bugs.xenserver.org
Maybe they'll want to investigate even if the hardware is not officially supported. If someone can reproduce the issue on supported hardware, that would make things easier.

Though I doubt it was woth the effort, as the support over there is well known (especially for not supported configurations etc.) I did it - for the reason of trying to improve stuff (and giving back to OSS community):
https://bugs.xenserver.org/projects/XSO/issues/XSO-955

@stormi dd stands for disk dump and does exactly that: Copy a stream of data.
Fio however can be configured for precise workloads and read/write mixes, parallel workloads etc.

So the first thing will only give you streamline benchmarks, what almost nobody cares about.
The second can simulate realworld (VM/database...) workloads, where (controller) Caches and non magnetic storage (Flash, Optane, MRAM...) makes the real difference.
Also use big amount of data, since caches can impact small ones extremely. Don't get me wrong: We need them and they can make huge differences, but as long as your benchmarks fully fit into them, it gives your nonsense/fake results. Also (consumer) SSDs start throttling after some 10 to a very few 100 GB of data written. Their caches fill up and they 'overheat'.

You can spend days on benchmarks and how to do what.

https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xen-orchestra-5-36/

The part about ZFS:

As there are many possibilities during the creation of a ZFS storage repository, you still need to use the command line (eg. zpool create zdata /dev/sdb) to create your SR.

Check this documentation for more information about ZFS SR creation.

Once the SR is created, you will have the option to select it during the SR creation directly in Xen Orchestra.

Since it's confusing and technically wrong, it should rather be something like:

As there are many possibilities during the creation of a ZFS storage repository, you still need to use the command line (eg. zpool create zdata /dev/sdb) to create a ZFS pool before creating the corresponding SR.

Check this documentation for more information about ZFS SR creation.

Once the ZFS pool is created and mounted, you will have the option to select the mountpoint during the SR creation directly in Xen Orchestra.

...and this forum is missing a "quote" button, as formating text in codeboxes doesn't work (and tags don't survive a linebreak, you have to mark it every line again).

Regards,
Christof

Citrix also has a long history of problematic VM guest-tools. Race conditions with broken drivers, unbootable VMs, broken agents... It's a pain in the a**.
If you like your VMs: Always make a snapshot of every VM before updating the tools.

Is known why they remove the VSS-functionality? I don't get why they remove features (again).

XCP-ng already ate a bunch of time, and I'm sure it'll continue for testing etc
I'm Sysadmin with very limited coding ability - I'm definately out for that.

I guess it would need someone being good at C#.NET. Also XAPI would probably need to know about it (what may already be, as you're implementing it into XOA)...

First rule of all benchmarks: The longer and more often they run, the more precise they are.
If we talk about 1G as base, why should I switch with 10 or 100 to M? That doesn't make any sense at all.

@maxcuttins did you really measure 10 and 100 MB after I said 1 G is not enough for accurate results?

Usually you set blocksize to something usefull, like 1M and set count to e.g. 10000.
Of course you can change blocksize to test a bit, but that's usually between like 64k and maybe 4M.

How about doing your own matrix?

You should consider, that efficiency of vCPUs goes down by each one you add. I don't have the link to that Citrix document handy, so you need to google that.
If you really need that many cores, you should consider a physical machine, which should make a serious bump in performance.
AFAIR it was the overhead of the Xen scheduler, which needs to balance the needs of your VM. The more vCPUs one VM has, the bigger the overhead. I'm sure it didn't change in more recent versions.

Exactly this. Not giving - especially paying customers - any feedback/info is just the worst way to do your business.

@danp Of course after I found the root cause, I fixed everything, VM is running.
...more or less, seems Debian 10.7 netboot can't be used as install media, as it can't find the NIC.
Seems it's missing or not recognized - even after I created a new VM:

Edit: I might have an idea... could be a problem with opnsense (freebsd) and DHCP requests to Linux. Whereas it works for a Windows 10 VM.
Will check if that checksumthing fixes it.

@danp Hmm now that's tricky.

XCP-ng center showed following dialog:

I created a local iso repo with XOA, which is visible in XOA and XCP-ng.
It's disconnected but the content still visible.

As I recently upgraded XCP-ng to 8.2, it killed the /srv/iso-store repo, but XCP-still thinks it's there, just disconnected and also allows to insert the ISOs as boot media.

It's a tricky situation and I consider it as a bug, though I don't really know how to fix that.
Of course the repo is still in the database, as XCP-ng can't know if it's a "real" storage repo or not. Otherwise I wonder why it doesn't empty the scanned content at startup and rescans it - if no result (because of disconnection), empty the shown content.
In current state it's a bit fiddling to debug and find the reason.

Definately XCP-ng center gives a helpful feedback, whereas XOAs feedback is not pointing you to the cause of the error. This is definately a thing one could fix - if XCP-ng center is able to identify it, XOA should be, too. I can create an issue @ github. @olivierlambert ?

@danp The host is running the XOA instance and already a Windows 10 and OpnSense VM.
That should answer all questions.

IIRC the other VMs have been created with that XOA instance, but can't say for sure right now.

(at least with XenServer you still had to create a pool manually, until then the server was pool-less)

I created a new VM with XOA 5.53.1 (freshly updated) on an XPC-ng 8.2.0 host (no pool) and can't start the VM.

It says:

  "name": "XapiError",
  "stack": "XapiError: NO_HOSTS_AVAILABLE()

I don't see any reasons. Memory is enough available, Disks have been placed during creation... what's wrong?

I have good experience with WiBu Key dongles and a "Matrix USB-Key" (also license dongle) but couldn't get an Aladdin HASP working.
I can pass it through (it's visible and attached) but the VM doesn't show it in device manger (Windows 10 1909). I gave up for now and will probably use a network USB thingie from SEH - already have 2 of their devices running in different environments and they work flawlessly.

@olivierlambert what people often forget or not think about: You want to have someting mature, tested, stability proven - especially for an LTSR. People who stay on these branches don't do it for bleeding edge stuff.

Citrix also has a long history of problematic VM guest-tools. Race conditions with broken drivers, unbootable VMs, broken agents... It's a pain in the a**.
If you like your VMs: Always make a snapshot of every VM before updating the tools.

Is known why they remove the VSS-functionality? I don't get why they remove features (again).

I'm not happy to see DMC dropping, but even more removal of "VSS and quiesced snapshots" is sad.
It's probably one more step from general Hypervisor solution to VDI, as it's not really important there, but if you have DB servers etc...

Interesting... I wanted to post it as news, but it popped up as existing (similar...) - so it seems it's officially out now!
I don't see what Xen 4.13 brings to us. We're still on the LTSR track and wait for Vates to get official support by HPE.

They say things about storage performance improvements:
Multipage support is now available in non-GFS2 SRs for better storage performance.

I'm curious about what people will report back - and when XCP 8.1 comes out.

@Carlos-Raasch said in Creating local ISO SR failed -> Feature request:

One option, considering a single server, you would have a local SR. Create there a "ISO folder" and mount it, like ESXi do, using the XO interface to manage the files.

It's what the whole topic is about.