OK, marking this solved... It was the phantom reboots causing issues because the tools were not fully installed, only thing I can't understand is why only 2 out of 3 Windows servers would quit. Any way, got the Xen Tools updated and a couple reboots later, everything is working again. Also I can now report that a bug that was fixed maybe a year ago is confirmed to work in my system. The bug was backing up a Windows VM that had a lot of empty space in the drive (over 250GB free) and turning on compression. It would time out counting zeros because it thought the process wasn't doing work. Both of these VMs are now compressing with zstd, one of them is substantially smaller now, the other only shrunk about 20GB. Because of the way Windows uses the drive, these are all full backups. The differential never seemed to be small because Windows does a lot of changes on the drive (there is a post about this somewhere in here from Olivier).

@Rod-G These have 9.4.2-xxxx and I need to go through and update everything now that I see how far behind I am. the second VM completed fine after its reboot, something was just stuck in a dirty state and got in the way of the import or health check.

And to really round this out, the MTBF for any of these is in the millions of hours (1.2-3M), that's a use time of 136.968 - 342.46 years respectively. Basically, if a drive dies, just replace it no matter what, but in the end the reliability of these drives is meant to outlast all of us. Unless you actually need some specific function provided in some form-factor or model, don't bother.

Do you have any SR using a VM? (like an ISO SR in a NFS share inside a VM). This is freezing NFS and makes host taking half an hour to restart. Logs should tell you why the RPU failed if it failed

Hi, I'm pretty sure this is planned to be addressed in XO6. Dan

I have not had time to work on this, and my lab changed significantly, had to spend a bunch of money to move it to a new rack and that rack has been disconnected for months so no real work in XCP or vSphere and learning to migrate VMs from vSphere to XCP which was one of my big intentions. But a recent post confirms that this "oddity" of trying to create a UEFI VM from XO-lite is still present. I'd bet money that this gets fixed before or when the full release is provided. https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/11227/boot-new-vm-to-iso-in-xo-lite Workaround is to either click the button provided to download XOA, or install Linux and XO from sources in BIOS mode. Then you have the full XO to work with to bring everything else up the way you want it. I see it as a minor annoyance right now, not really a bug or problem.

@Greg_E Not sure what or why, but fresh install of everything in my lab has allowed a successful "standard" backup, I'll get into the other flavors when I have a chance as I build the lab back out. [image: stuckbackup4.png]

Warm migration is probably the safest bet in all circumstances because there's no CPU compatibility issues

@olivierlambert I was looking for a way to mark this solved, can't find it. I haven't moved things, but after migrating my big lab to my mini-lab, I'm confident that the warm migration is the way to go. It was fast and seamless as long as you have the right network adapters set up. I had to fool with one of my networks to make a VM function, but that was certainly something I overlooked while setting up the mini-lab. A little testing before moving the VMs should make this go easily if using the old servers is the option for this project.

@olivierlambert Thanks. I've been doing some digging this morning and what I was thinking of testing isn't going to work. It's interesting reading but not going to help me.

@olivierlambert Which one, powershell or WAC. They are kind of one in the same when you look at how WAC makes the calls to do the work, there's a button to reveal the powershell behind the button clicks so you might be able to get both at once. But WAC draws nice graphs and gives us a GUI to get the work done. Yes I know, real Admins don't use GUI. Whatever, AI will eat our jobs anyway, just trying to stick it out another 9 years at this point. When I get time, I'll still probably take a swing at this task for WAC, because to me this would be valuable. Big learning curve though. Now if MS would finally add Group Policy to WAC and fix some of the DHCP and DNS features that are still in preview...

@TS79 I had not seen that adapter, finding a main board that supports bifurcation is probably easier than a card that bifurcates. I'll have to look at some of the devices I have and see if this is supported.

@olivierlambert Thank you, that's what I thought and why I was willing to buy the lower end CPU in order to get the project through. At the time going for the larger Gold would have doubled the cost of each server.

I've been spending some time on it for the last few nights, and my skills are improving little by little. I think Ubuntu desktop was the closest I got to functional, there is a custom image for the Rpi3b+ that I found and it was one of the attempts that got to trying to start the XO-server service and failed. I was never able to get the xo-server to start manually either and the log files didn't give me anything I understood. One of the versions that worked the least was CentOS 7 for RPi, node.js is not available for it in the normal repos. I have more experience with CentOS from a few years ago and more comfortable with it, may have to look into compiling all the dependencies from source to see if I can make it work. I think an RPi 4b with 2gb or 4gb of RAM might be a better choice, but I have the 3b+.