Hi everyone,

I’m facing an issue in my XCP-ng environment and would really appreciate some advice or best practices.

I have a pool with 3 XCP-ng hosts, and I’m running Xen Orchestra (XOA) as a VM on the second host (not the master). Everything runs fine under normal conditions.

However, if I reboot the master host, I temporarily lose all control of the pool through XOA. Even though XOA is still up and running on the second host, it can’t see any hosts, VMs, or storage — it’s like the entire pool becomes unmanageable until the master comes back online.

My setup:
• 3-host XCP-ng pool
• XOA is a VM on host 2 (not the master)
• When the master is rebooted, XOA loses access to the infrastructure
• When the master is back online, everything works again

My questions:
1. Is this behavior expected in a multi-host pool?
2. Is there a safe way to promote another host to master automatically or manually during planned or unplanned downtime?
3. Would it be better to run XOA outside of the pool, on a dedicated device (e.g., a NUC, VM on another hypervisor)?
4. Are there best practices for ensuring high availability of the management layer (XAPI + XOA)?

Thanks a lot for your help!

@Andrew How to find the good version in 8.3 ?

Hello everyone,

I have a client who recently ordered a new physical server infrastructure along with a SAN. They are currently running two CentOS hosts that haven’t been updated in five years. Given their strong preference for open-source solutions (they are a higher education institution), I’m considering migrating them to XCP-ng.

My initial plan is to deploy the fully open-source version of XCP-ng (Community Edition) to allow them to test the platform for about a year before potentially moving to the paid version at the end of 2025.

My main questions are:
1. Is the Community Edition stable enough for production use in this type of environment?
2. Has anyone here deployed the free version in a similar scenario, and what were your experiences?
3. Are there any key limitations in the Community Edition that might impact long-term adoption before transitioning to a paid plan?

The primary goal is to ensure a smooth migration and provide them with a reliable solution while staying within their open-source philosophy. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!