@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

@Danp Appears to be fixed

@emiltmx said in Restoring from backup failing:

@DustinB even if the old installation is an older version of XO?

We were running 5.74 on the old one, 5.91 on the new one (I think? Xen Orchestra, commit 838f9).

I can't say for certain that the config hasn't undergone any major changes, but you should at least test it.

The only thing that doesn't exist (for this particular backup) is that the json file listed doesn't exist.

@Danp said in Cleaning up Detached Backups:

@DustinB I assume your XO is up-to-date, correct?

Yes, this is the latest version.

@olivierlambert said in Detached Backup Cleanup:

Hey, nice to see you manage to find a new position while still having XCP-ng around

Thanks, yeah its been a bit since I've engaged with XO/XCP-ng in a work place I'm very happy to be here (there is just a lot to clean up) Ha

@Danp said in Detached Backup Cleanup:

I wonder if the backups would "reattach" if you restored the most recent backup?

I've been hanging in there. I will be looking for work in the new year. How about you?

I just started this new gig about 1.5 weeks ago, it'll be good for me. The last place was horrible for my health.

Took a pay raise and benefits too, so I can't complain.

Glad you've been hanging in there.

@McHenry said in Understanding remote management using XO:

@Danp

I am using CE so I do not think XO proxy is available at this time.

You can setup a proxy yourself using the CE version, just like with everything with the CE version, your milage may vary.

@mbriet Yes you can do this, here's some documentation on ACLs.

@palova XO can be installed and used from anywhere, you could even have multiple XO instances running simultaneously on different systems all with access to the same singular host, just avoid having those instances run backup jobs etc.

It would be much easier to have XO running somewhere so you could administer this host before and post migration - that isn't running on either system.

Make sure you export a copy of the running configuration from XO you have now so you can import it into the final XO system once all migration work is completed.

So I'm scratching my head on this one... "No Xen tools detected"

Yet..

Am I missing something stupidly simple?