@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

@ejgagne6189 XO Lite and XOA are very different products. XO Lite is meant to manage a single XCP-ng hypervisor (or host).

XO from source (or XOCE) and XOA are meant to manage your entire environment of XCP-ng hosts, and provides you a fully featured management/backup and administrative interface for any number of hosts (or pools).

In terms of your inability to create new VM's some more details may be required... are you able to provide screenshots of your host(s) configured within XO, obviously obscure any confidential information like usernames and passwords.

Well then I guess I'm glad to say I'm not insane, I was thinking maybe it was network latency or something else (which is completely plausible) but as far as I could tell this seems like XOA is unable to ping the domain.

Which doesn't make any sense, it's not like the website has gone offline..

@sb2014 said in VDI migration:

The virtual hard disk is still displayed in the server's file system.
How do I get it back into xoa?

Were you trying to move XOA's disk to another SR? In the absolute worst case you could either deploy XO-Lite or another instance of XOA on your host and then reattach the existing host so you can administer the environment.

@rfx77 said in XenServer-8 to XCP-NG:

Hi!

We have some hosts with XenServer-8 Trial Edition. XenServer limited the runtime to 90 days so we cannot update anymore to avoid this.

Is there an easy way to migrate to XCP-NG without Backup/Restore or Export/Import of the VMs?

We would prefere XCP-NG 8.2 but if this is not possible XCP-NG 8.3 is also an option.

I have already read to docs but i am not shure how the migration is when you come from Xenserver-8
We do not use any not supported fs (GFS,XFS). We use ext4

XenServer Version according to XO: XenServer Trial Edition 8.4.0 (trial)

Greetings!

There is a rather well documented approach to migrating which can be read here, https://docs.xcp-ng.org/installation/upgrade/#upgrade-from-xenserver.

To summarize, you should be able to simply connect your bootable USB to your existing server, run the upgrade process and then be good from there on.

Of course if you need to account for downtime or can't afford down time you'd have to move the VM's on a given host somewhere else first.

@Forza said in Advice on backup for windows fileservers:

You mentioned open source. One option is https://www.urbackup.org/. We have been looking at it as a replacement for Acronis for bare-metal machines, but not yet made a decision.

Wow I feel like I've gone back in time. UrBackup is a really solid solution for agent based backups. I've used it, though I had a few challenges, namely mobile devices which was my target at the time and weren't on the same LAN.

Anything over the internet is just going to be slow. But for using this to take an additional data only backup of a Windows or Linux VM would work well, though I don't know how well it would work to take a block level backup.

I think it's still being developed too.

@Prilly said in XCP-NG 8.3 xsconsole backup, restore pool metadata:

@stormi

How do you restore this metadata backup in xcp-ng 8.3 without the use of XO?

This is absolutely something to write about in the release note of 8.3. when is it expected back?

Why would you not have XO running literally anywhere else with access to the pool so you could perform these operations if needed?

Is anyone else having issues with XOA failing on check-in, see below. Everything is functioning as expected besides this, not sure if I should be worried or not.

@cirosantos0 I've not personally used the sequences feature, but from what you said you've disabled a Backup job for these VMs, and then are creating a new Sequence for these VMs.

Are you certain the Health Alerts aren't related to the Disabled backup job?

I know that if you remove a VM from a backup job that's already kicked off through tagging or editing the job to remove the VM directly that the Backup Health tab will list those runs and that VM as unhealthy.

@JeffBerntsen You likely would have to filter on this setting "Manage Citrix PV drivers via Windows Update" though I'm not sure what the reference would be within XCP-ng off hand.