@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.

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).

@Danp said in Run a script inside guest OS from host:

@ajpri1998 What about using something like psexec or
the powershell command Invoke-Command?

Exactly what I was going to recommend, but the request is to be sent from XCP-ng (the hypervisor) rather than some management server..

What would the Windows PowerShell command be doing within the VM, that resides on XCP-ng?

and

Why does the hypervisor need to issue the command to the VM?

@TechGrips said in How to do Simple Backup to Local USB Drive?:

Also, ESXi is overly expensive proprietary trash!

I don't disagree. I'd use Hyper-V over ESXi, as at least Hyper-V is free. The management is utter trash, but at least I'm not paying for simply virtualization.

@lawrencesystems said in Delta backup questions:

If you choose 2 storage destinations it will copy to each of them at the same time.

As a discrete backup that is saved to each location individually.

replying to follow, FR created: 22844

@jebrown said in Backup folder and disk names:

@DustinB for this the backups are made then hard drives are removed and stored

Are you removing USB drives or drives from you host?

@jebrown said in Backup folder and disk names:

@DustinB we have off site backups taken regularly this is in addition to our normal backup plan
we have
daily, weekly, monthly onsite across 3 data centers and off site along with immutable backups im not even sure why we take these additional backups but its what the boss wants so we do it..

To ask, would a separate backup job not work for this, or do you specifically want to replicate an existing backup to a different location?

@jebrown said in Backup folder and disk names:

@Forza yes that would work but is there a way to automate this... say
step 1 take a snapshot of VM-1, VM-2, ect.
step 2 export them as ova to current data store
then we could run this job and copy them over as needed otherwise its very time consuming to do them 1 at a time and download

To ask, because I feel like I'm missing something, are you attempting to simply copy your backups to a different NFS/SMB share or are you trying to do something else?

XO (source or XOA) are meant to be replaceable, so long as you have a copy of your metadata and configuration you can always restore your VMs.

@Forza you're getting .8 GBps, which doesn't seem unreasonable. Are the SR's attached to 1GB networking?

Separate question, why are you opting to use RAID 0, purely for the performance gain?

@jebrown said in Backup folder and disk names:

we have backup job's running, and every 6 months we need to copy a couple of our VM's to external storage and store them offline in a secured environment.......
But if we need to recover this data there isnt a way to identify "VM-1" to copy it over to our production environment without XOA.

so if i want to only recover VM-1 i would need to connect our entire secured storage to the network so XOA could identify a single VM, what im looking for is a easier way of identifying what drive belongs to each vm in applications such as windows file explorer.

Could you use the UUID of a given VM, this would remain the same from your production and backups. You could then search for that UUID or manually track it for your tests.

Separately I whole-heartedly disagree with only making offsite backups ever 6 months, using something like BackBlaze B2 or S3 buckets it way to convenient and cost-effective to not use it continously.

@TechGrips said in How to do Simple Backup to Local USB Drive?:

Also, ESXi is overly expensive proprietary trash!

I don't disagree. I'd use Hyper-V over ESXi, as at least Hyper-V is free. The management is utter trash, but at least I'm not paying for simply virtualization.

@TechGrips As a side thought, you could take these 4TB USB drives and put them into any old chassis and create your own NAS/SAN helping to address the issues we're discussing.

You're not going to need a lot of compute resources, though of course more helps, but if you're in a financial pinch, I would still defer to using any other backup repo over USB drives. The challenges posed with USB drives are simply a non-starter for me personally and professionally.

Something like TrueNAS is free and open source, you would just need a motherboard, CPU and RAM.

It would make the backup operation way simpler from a general management standpoint of XCP-ng and XO, though you'd have to manage the TrueNAS environment (some additional overhead).

@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

@altikardes said in vmware import problem.:

Hello everyone, I am trying to import a virtual machine with the vmware import tool but when I try to connect I get the message "Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'map')". Is anyone experiencing this issue?

XOA version: 5.100.2
Vmware version: VMware ESXi, 8.0.2, 23305546

What version of VMWare are you using, and what are you licensed for?

Initial recommendation based on common issues.

• Uninstall ESXi guest drivers
• Turn off the VM you're trying to import

Guest Drivers can cause compatibility issues.

If you're using the lowest licensing from VMWare, you don't have access to live migration, thus you'll have to turn off the VM.

If you can provide more details, we can try to help.

@ejgagne6189 So from the first screenshot it looks like you haven't added your XCP-ng host to the XO interface.

What you need to do is add it in the below section