@olivierlambert I was able to sort out the issue, it has to do with licensing and the fact that we aren't licensed to with "Live Migration" for this ESXi host.

Essentially this inquiry is solved.

@TechGrips While I can understand the desire to use removable USB as a Backup Repo, I would highly discourage it.

Managing and rotating USB drives is a pain, if they go to sleep, it's a pain, if they fail it's a pain, if you forget to rotate your drives, it's a pain.

I personally can understand the desire to do so, it's cheap and relatively affective if you can deal with these risks, however so is just using any NFS or SMB share and then having a replication script that could write to your USB, which you could then rotate. Separating your XCP-ng hosts, XO, and your backups is of critical importance because if you have any sort of server room environmental issues or failure, you're risking loosing everything.

XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra, while they do offer a ton of flexibility, there is obviously trades-offs to using less than ideal components, such as external USB drives as your primary backup repository.

If you really want to insist on using USB drives, you'll have to attach the drives to your host and then pass them through to your XO installation, which when you want to rotate those drives you'll have to update your Backup jobs within XO and confirm that your XO VM has the proper access to the drives. This seems like a lot of complexity for very little financial benefit.

Separately I think you're taking your own frustrations out on the community, because of a lack of understanding in the tooling that you testing in comparison to ESXi where you'd attach a USB drive directly, perform your backup, remove the disk and attach another.

I get that ESXi can make things "simple" but simple isn't always better.

HTH

The reason you wouldn't want to look at XO for this from a technical standpoint is because XO works at the hardware level of the hypervisor, dolling out resources to different VMs and creating backups.

You need to look at the content within a given VM and compare the file system difference from points A and B.

Only something that is operating within the file system would be able to readily tell you "Something has changed".

Odds are you have a user or several who are dumping files onto a share that they shouldn't be, or are replicating some cloud service to keep a copy on your server etc.

If I had my choice, Prevent Migration is more understandable.

Disable Migration, while it means the same thing, doesn't naturally come out of the English language.

@flakpyro said in How to migrate XOA itself?:

@DustinB Are the any downsides to having two XOA instances pointing at the same pool? Since the config itself is stored at the pool level im guessing theres no downside?

IE: Priimary XOA running in core DC and secondary XOA running at your DR site. Is it just a matter of adding the pool on the secondary XOA and it downloads the existing config or did you need to do a full export / import?

If you import your configuration, each XO instance will think they should be running the backups as far as I've noticed. If I have two instances running with the same configuration, I simply disable the backup jobs on one of them.

The config file is just an XML that contains your existing instance. You can import it to any new XO instance and have the same exact configuration.

@yzgulec there really isn't any hard-fast rules to aligning CPU to vCPU. A Guest is going to need cores to operate no matter what.

If you're trying to min-max your CPU utilization for a given system, you might want to target the guest to use between 70-80% of it's vCPU all of the time.

This is all a part of system tuning and is always a shifting target, as CPU is shared among all VMs and DOM0.

As you increase the number of guests on a host, the CPU consumption will be increased, which means you may need to scale back on the vCPU a given VM has.

@olivierlambert I agree wholeheartedly with you on that. Keeping the system stock is best for support.

Separately, is there any planned work on officially integrating support for Uninterruptable Power Supplies and XCP-ng 8.3?

A question

• Have you clicked into the console screen before hitting F12?

You can disable all of the boot devices in the Advanced section of the VM, try disabling the HDD

Disable the Boot options if your system is making it past POST to quickly so you can get into the Guests BIOS.

@jasonnix said in A question for the creators of XO:

Hi @olivierlambert,
No, I'm not a bot. I asked it because I need your experiences. I want to make a panel for Xen.

So you know how to program with PHP and Ruby and not with Javascript, so the question is really "Why can't this be rewritten so I can help?"

For laughs I am testing with a VM that is powered off and its going, albeit slowly (likely due to a 10FDx port on the ESXi host).

Using XCP-ng 8.3 (latest round of updates).

• VM is Kali Linux 2025.1
• vCPU 16
• RAM 32GB
• Graphical Memory: 16M

Occasionally after a reboot the Console within XOA will result in extremely low performance. Anyone have any idea what causing this.

@yzgulec said in How to deploy XO on ESXi:

I just used VMware Converter for V2V (seems more practical for me)

Installing from Source or using an installation script from the community is also very straight-forwards.

Maybe 10 minutes worth of setup for the OS and then for at least my github it's a single line installation.

@yzgulec said in How to deploy XO on ESXi:

I need to deploy Xen Orchestra on ESXi.

When I download Xen Orchestra, the downloaded file is in XVA format and it is impossible to import it to ESXi directly.

Now, I will try to convert using VMware Converter but I am looking for easier way to deploy XO on ESXi (if there is any)

(I know XO is based on Xen but I wish there was a OVA template for XO to deploy it on ESXi. Or ISO would work too.)

Thank you.

Just create a Debian VM and then follow the Built from Source or XOCE installation process.

@CodeMercenary said in What's the recommended way to reboot after applying XCP-ng patches?:

So, it appears that I can't use that when I'm running local storage.

Yeah using local storage non-shared on your host poses a ton of challenges, basically you would need to shutdown your VMs put your secondary hosts into maintenance mode and then reboot the environment, starting with the pool master.

@irtaza9 need some more context on this.

Are you trying to add a host that is a part of another pool is already a member of the pool that youre connected too?

Details please.

@yzgulec there really isn't any hard-fast rules to aligning CPU to vCPU. A Guest is going to need cores to operate no matter what.

If you're trying to min-max your CPU utilization for a given system, you might want to target the guest to use between 70-80% of it's vCPU all of the time.

This is all a part of system tuning and is always a shifting target, as CPU is shared among all VMs and DOM0.

As you increase the number of guests on a host, the CPU consumption will be increased, which means you may need to scale back on the vCPU a given VM has.

@ph7 said in Enhancement suggestion: Filter showing VMs that don't have the agent installed:

@DustinB
Use the save function

God I'm blind..... been wishing for this for a while...

@olivierlambert said in Enhancement suggestion: Filter showing VMs that don't have the agent installed:

Yes you can save it and make it even default for your current user

As my dad would say "If it were a snake it would've bit you in the ass by now"

@julien-f said in Enhancement suggestion: Filter showing VMs that don't have the agent installed:

power_state:running !managementAgentDetected?

Is there any way to save filters so they can be used again later, besides in a notes app?

@LonnieTC Don't try to install XCP-ng as if it's any other Linux OS. It's an appliance, you need to download the XCP-ng ISO directly, install this to your hardware and then setup your management interface (Xen Orchestra). Xen Orchestra is installable to Ubuntu.

@bvitnik Yeah, sysprep is and isn't something that I would say the guest tools and hypervisor should know about... I understand why it's a "nice to have" function, but I personally think this falls to the sys-admin to address ahead of a change like this.