Why is it these people can never spell?

+1 for avoiding 3rd party install scripts, the official install doc is like, 10 commands? I think it takes maybe 10 minutes or less the last time I did it on a fresh debian system, and you know it's always the correct instructions (which is NOT the case with 3rd party scripts, as you'll see in this forum when even the slightest architectural change is made to the XO sources). You also get to learn at least a little bit about the architecture of what you're installing and running instead of pressing go on a script you grabbed from some guy's github and hoping the XO web interface appears. I thought the whole point of "homelab" (for which sources are intended and primarily used) was learning and developing skills in the first place?

No disrespect intended to the people that create and maintain said scripts, it just seems to me like it bypasses the point of sources a little bit

I can start adding to this this weekend probably - would a "guide to installing pfsense" be useful? I know there's many guides out there already, but more than half of them have useless (or worse than useless) steps telling people to turn off things that don't need to be turned off

Out of curiosity, can you post the output of node -v ? I realized the node install docs we link to only has instructions on installing node 10 and above now

@jtbw911 I won't argue with you there, freenas has definitely had some issues. I've been lucky enough to make it work for my own needs, but it certainly isn't plug and play, especially when it comes to backing virtualization platforms. They've at least acknowledged the awful old interface and have been working on replacing it but of course that's brought more issues with the new UI code, I've just been toughing it out until it approaches stable. I will say the bug(s) I've filed on their bug tracker got very quick attention and patches, at least. Just don't even bother reporting things on their forum, I won't mention any usernames but I'm sure you can guess

@jtbw911 This is on mostly gen 12 dell hardware (R720, R620, etc) so coming up on 8 years old now, not exactly what I would call the latest and greatest. If you peruse the freenas forums, you will also find a lot of users there (mostly esxi users in fact) have also been migrating from iSCSI to NFS as the performance delta is all but gone these days (aided by running a recent freeNAS release). Some tickets are certainly related to configuration mistakes, but they are a small minority. Even perfectly setup, iscsi is much more prone to race conditions, leaving a giant mess of VDI chains when there's an issue, etc. If you'd like to test for yourself, just interrupt the connection to an iSCSI SR during a chain operation, it will take hours to clean up the aftermath. With NFS, there's no issue at all, it will gracefully remount and continue working when the remote returns. This is one example of the tickets we have to deal with.

If you are set on iSCSI that's of course an option, (it's still supported for a reason), but as you note you will be wasting a lot of storage space to snapshots

NFS is SO much simpler than iSCSI and less prone to issues. I would say around 30% of our pro user trouble tickets involve fixing people's iSCSI issues, and almost zero NFS related tickets. I would retest your performance comparisons, the performance gap between the two has shrunk considerably in the past. Not to mention you will also have thin provisioning

that looks good, and the fact that the VM is properly using the new SSH keys means the config data (and config drive) is properly being formatted and passed to the VM, and the VM is picking it up and using it - which rules out XOA as the source of the issue. It looks like CentOS is choosing to ignore the hostname config, I'm not an experienced centOS user so I have no idea.

paste exactly what you're entering into the two cloud-init config boxes in XO

How much RAM does the system have? my first guess is the host doesn't have enough free RAM to start the VM, the dom0 management VM will take some up, plus whatever VM you're trying to start

I'm not sure, I have not used cloud-init in centos. I'd imagine it's similar, you need to find the cloud-init config file in your centos template install, and edit it to prefer the nocloud datasource

In terraform for vsphere they are not using cloud-init, they're using "guest customization" which apparently just uses vmware guest tools: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-E63B6FAA-8D35-428D-B40C-744769845906.html#GUID-E63B6FAA-8D35-428D-B40C-744769845906

XCP-NG / xen guest tools do not have the option of configuring the network like this that I know of, only reporting

it's hard to understand exactly what you're asking, but that only works with the nocloud datasource because that's the design of cloud-init (out of our control). nocloud is the only data source (versus openstack) that cloud-init will allow network config: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/datasources/nocloud.html