@gduperrey Got it, thank you for your assistance, this is super helpful.

@gduperrey We went 8.2 because we wanted to test XOSTOR. It sounds like our options are limited. Windows 10 mainstream support goes EOL in October which is what's driving this for us.

@olivierlambert Fabulous! This is great news!

@olivierlambert Perfect, I'll take a look.

Will the packer plugin be updated to use XO?

@olivierlambert Hey there!

Basically I'm trying to recreate an ansible workflow I have that provisions a new VM from a template. And then correctly sets tags and notes etc according to who ran the job, date, OS details etc.

You're right that it's probably better to use XO, just the packer plugin I was using seemed to only target a single node so that's why I was going that way.

I'm a bit unclear on when to use nodes in a pool and when to use XO.

I've been using ddelnano's excellent module to build templates using Packer and I'm nearly at a useful point. But the one thing that's missing, and I can't find an answer to, is how to enable VTPM so I can build Windows 11 templates.

Is there a way to do this in the plugin? How are other people automating the build of their Windows 11 templates right now?

Thanks.

In the xe command line docs for xenserver I can see that you can use the xe command line to set, for example, the description field for a vm like so.

xe vm-param-set uuid=<vm_uuid>other-config:description="<your_notes_here>"

If I do :

xe vm-param-list uuid=<vm_uuid>

I can see where xo:resource_set is listed in other-config but it's unclear to me how to set that property due to the extra : contained in it?

Also, if there's a way to set the following.

vm notes
vm tags

Thanks.

@DustinB Our smallest VXrail is 6 nodes and 31tb and there's a few in between up to our largest which is 16 nodes 400tb.

All of our other Vmware clusters are Dell Blades which use FC.

The goal would be to use the existing VXrail hardware without having to purchase new FC cards, storage etc.

We're not adverse to using 8.2, I just mentioned it to demonstrate I've at least done some reading on the subject!

To my knowledge, none of our existing VMs are >2tb.

We're in the middle of considering having a look at XCP-NG+XOSTOR with a view to replacing VMware running oue Dell VXrail platforms.

Has anyone done this? What problems did you encounter?

Should we be looking at NFS/FC SRs instead?

I'm aware XOSTOR doesn't currently support 8.3 and that there's still a 2tb limit but I'm curious what peoples experiences are of doing this.

Thanks.

@olivierlambert Yes. Using Cloudbase-init.

I'd like to use something like -

hostname: uk-xcp-{something}

Where {something} is a number that XO keeps track of per group so that for a new VM {something} is unique.

@olivierlambert Ah, good spot on the doc, thank you!

Regarding the 'name'.

As you say there are two different things. There's the 'name' field which the user fills out and the 'hostname'.

I would like to enforce the hostname. I have Windows VMs and I need to make sure there are no name space collisions when they're domain joined.

VRA and a few other VM self service portals allow you to create a policy specifying the hostname of any deployed VMs.

Hi there,

I'm looking for documentation on the self service feature of Xen Orchestra and my google-fu is failing me. I've been looking in particular at https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/ but I can't find "self service" mentioned in the column on the left?

I'm trying to figure out how the self service feature works, in particular, how I can enforce a naming scheme for the VMs provisioned from templates. Because the workloads I might use are Windows VMs, which are domain joined, I don't want users to have the ability to specify their own names.

I understand the cloud config uses {name}% which appends a number on to the end of the name. However, the tooltip that appears when you click the 'i' suggests that this just appends a number to the name the user gives the vm.

So if I wanted a standard naming scheme, for example -

<2 letter geographic tag>-<group name>-<number>

I want XO to manage the <number> and keep track of which numbers have been assigned already. So for example -

uk-test-1
uk-test-3
uk-test-9

Etc.

Is this possible as XO stands today? I'm currently using source built XO.

I'm trying to evaluate how much of our existing self service capability we have built out in VMware that I can replicate in XO.

Thanks.

@ruskofd Awesome, thank you!

Hey there,

I've recently started looking into xen orchestra+xcp-ng as a self service vm portal for users to provision their own Windows and Linux vms. One thing I'm missing though is a good primer on what's required to make those base templates and in the case of windows do an active directory domain join.

With VMware I'm used to making templates from code with packer, and then the vm cloned from the template is customised with some ansible scripts.

I'm having a bit of a hard time find some good end to end references on how to do this in xcp-ng. Any links with reading material or general advice from people who have already achieved this would be appreciated.

Thanks!