XCP-NG support/licensing ended up being too expensive for us to justify it. We would have been paying about the same amount as we were paying for VMWare before the price hike.
To get the multiyear pricing you have to pay for all those years up front. VMWare did not have a same restriction pre price hike.
@nikade
For the NFS thing, how's your performance compared to just iSCSI or whatever else you have underneath NFS. We thought it sounded a bit overcomplicated to put NFS servers in front of storage for that many VMs and that critical an infrastructure piece, and were concerned about performance.
This is a duplicate of my reddit post so I apologize. The XCP-NG subreddit doesn't seem to have a ton of traffic so I wanted to spread this post a bit wider.
https://www.reddit.com/r/xcpng/comments/1czm1oi/switching_to_xcpng_want_to_hear_your_problems/
My org is strongly considering switching to XCP-NG as our hypervisor ASAP. We need to make a decision on this in the next couple weeks. Our environment is probably medium-sized, with over 1000 VMs. I've done a lot of testing and it seems like a good product so far. We're worried about what we might be missing, though.
What issues have you encountered? What has thrown a serious wrench in your plans or been hard to deal with?
A couple things I've run into that I'm curious to hear about more:
Seems there are issues with Secure Boot on Windows: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/guides/guest-UEFI-Secure-Boot/#:~:text=Enabling Secure Boot for the,Citrix work with Secure Boot. It sounds like we need to have Citrix guest tools installed? I've done that but Secure Boot still fails on Windows VMs. Or are the "Citrix VP drivers" a different thing that I need to look into?
We use iSCSI with SANs for storage. This doesn't support this provision in XCP-NG, which we absolutely need. Our SANs do support thin provision. In my limited testing the SAN thin provision seems to work, but I'm wondering if anybody has used this long term. If we start running out of storage in 1 year because relying on Dell SAN thin provision isn't good, that's not going to be pretty.
RAM access performance of VMs seems to be much lower on XCP-NG compared to ESXi and Hyper-V (over 10x slower when testing via sysbench. Windows doesn't show this speed decrease). Overall, XCP-NG performance seems mostly on par with ESXi (save a couple test cases), so I'm not really worried about that, but wondering if anybody knows why RAM access is so much slower.
Importing VMs from ESXi via Xen Orchestra works, but it is very slow and the live import is broken. StarWind has a converter that works with some other hypervisors, and it allows you to import a VM while it's running through snapshots. This feature seems to be broken in Xen Orchestra, and would be very nice to have.