Lot of assumptions in that The Register write up.

Hobbyists not wanting to pay for licences, running on old hardware, supporting charities, etc. (Paraphrased)

The reality is that any "hobbyist" playing with this kind of tech, it's really a hobbyist. I'm not sure I would class anyone playing with this kind of technology a hobbyist, this suggests a lack of professionalism towards these technologies.

Let's be honest, 95% of people playing with this tech are going to be in some fairly high end jobs and/or high end IT consultancy. No-one has a hobby to use Type 1 Hypervisors, server grade hardware (brand new OR second hand) and commercial grade networking infrastructure required as a baseline to get this set up.

Many people in the IT world have probably never even heard of the concept of a Type 1 Hypervisor, let alone want to get into this well-known "Hobby".

The majority of the community contribute to progress their own understanding from a professional perspective and to pay it forward to support those who are chomping at their heels.

The reality is that for most big corporate enterprise companies (Citrix and many others) is that they often go down the route of providing £x,xxx training courses to learn their tech and expecting organisations to pay for this. Many organisations don't invest heavily in their staff through corporate training programmes. So people are left to find these things out on their own time in many cases.

No individual outside of the corporate working world is going to pay this level of investment for a course that, in my experience (not related to Citrix specifically), often provides little added value beyond a few Google searches, a ton of questions in the community and a watching a few YouTube videos.

There is a big difference in a community of professionals and a community of hobbyists.

If anything, that write up just shows how little they still understand about the community.

Good old Windows automatic upgrade/reboot/annoying-as-hell-feature has kicked-in.

I've just re-tested this since the above has happened (causing the endless disruptions across everything running on Windows). But anyhow.

Seems to be magically fine now from an XO perspective (I've not done a single thing since this post VS this annoying auto Windows reboot/upgrade);

No idea what this issue could have been caused by, highly likely a weird compatibility issue with a specific Google Chrome version is what I would come to the conclusion of.

Seems like the age old solution in IT has worked again..... Turn it off and back on again

I've had a few issues over recent years (other technology stacks, nothing related to XCP-ng stuff) where Google Chrome Version X,xx has broken something that should "just work", so I'd add this to the list of items that fall into that category based on this not working then magically working again after a forced reboot + general upgrade etc.

It certainly does explain why I was confused along the way Anyhow looks like this is solved.

What a weird issue, nothing related to XO in the end after all. The joys of working in IT/Technology/Software, so many layers inside and outside of control etc.

Also curious what the use case of this is.

The only genuine use case I can think of for this is for a basic Storage Repository containing ISOs for VMs so they can spin up.

Or are you expecting an AWS S3 equivalent or Windows File Explorer equivalent?

Thanks @lawrencesystems - I've finally got around to watching that video, explains the content well, quite interesting to see that happening in real time when the RAM is being land-grabbed by other VMs when things are getting full based on the different configuration settings.

@tjkreidl That sounds like it's answered 99% of initial questions to be fair.

The 1% I'm not clear on is, what would happen in the scenario whereby say I have 10x VMs, which in total took up 100% of RAM for example - but they were all turned off.

Would I still be able to create an 11th VM with 100%+X RAM allocation and still turn it on successfully? i.e. because the other 10VMs are turned off?

From what you've said, I'd come to the conclusion of 'yes'.

Seems easier to have a conversation around the topic rather than me trial and error playing around blindly.

How does this work? I've yet to reach the max CPU + RAM allocation to the VMs on the XCP-ng Server Host, so I'm just thinking ahead.

For each VM, are the CPU and RAM allocations fixed, i.e.

1. 1x CPU Core and 2GB RAM, is that 100% dedicated to that VM, even though it may only be using 10% of that capacity and/or may even be turned off.

or

2. Is the capacity shared in one way or another

or

3. A mixture of both depending on some configuration settings I haven't spotted yet?

I'm pretty sure it's #1 from the above out of the box, but just checking.

And if my current understanding is correct, what options are there for over provisioning with the acceptable consideration that performance degradation is likely.

In reality this is for a lab setup, so this is more to over provision to allow more playground VMs as more often than not only a small handful will be turned on at any one time.

Which thinking about this just as I type raises another thought. Is it possible to over provision as long as things are turned off? That's a bit of a second question I guess as both scenarios are valid.

Good old Windows automatic upgrade/reboot/annoying-as-hell-feature has kicked-in.

I've just re-tested this since the above has happened (causing the endless disruptions across everything running on Windows). But anyhow.

Seems to be magically fine now from an XO perspective (I've not done a single thing since this post VS this annoying auto Windows reboot/upgrade);

No idea what this issue could have been caused by, highly likely a weird compatibility issue with a specific Google Chrome version is what I would come to the conclusion of.

Seems like the age old solution in IT has worked again..... Turn it off and back on again

I've had a few issues over recent years (other technology stacks, nothing related to XCP-ng stuff) where Google Chrome Version X,xx has broken something that should "just work", so I'd add this to the list of items that fall into that category based on this not working then magically working again after a forced reboot + general upgrade etc.

It certainly does explain why I was confused along the way Anyhow looks like this is solved.

What a weird issue, nothing related to XO in the end after all. The joys of working in IT/Technology/Software, so many layers inside and outside of control etc.

Interesting.

Chrome with a Dark Mode theme installed;

Edge (default as I don't use);

I can only assume that it's the Dark Mode theme I've installed on Google Chrome getting in the way with things and getting a bit confused.

No wonder why I was getting confused, I couldn't see the thing I was expecting to see, yet it was right in front of my face hiding in plain sight

@Andrew "You can access the VM console from XO as long as XO has server (not guest) access. It's out of band access to the virtual VGA console."

How would I verify what level of access it has? Is there a page/screen in XO that shows this info?

Very quick insights, thanks all. Great to have an active community.

I've since installed Guest Tools on the VM via XCP-ng Center as it was something I needed to do to process with something.

But before I did this, these buttons weren't allowing me to click them, came up with a stop-sign icon and a message that was saying that I couldn't click them because there was no IP;

If it's nothing obvious from what I've said above, I'll see if I can re-create the exact steps on a new VM to replicate the exact steps I did to get this error error message.

It just raised my eyebrow when I saw the error. As within XCP-ng Centre I'm used to using this tab and seeing a handy console window which allows me to get to the VM command line (i.e. in the case when there is no IP and I can't access via PuTTy) so I can still control the VM to fix anything I have screwed up, such as installing Guest Tools, then I can access via PuTTy from that point forward which is just a better user experience than via the in-built console in XCP-ng Center

I'm trying to replicate all the familiar things I'm used to from XCP-ng Center within XO whilst getting up to speed.

Ok, so I know how to do this. But I'm confused when it comes to XO, let me explain.

1. Create VM via XO (I'm fairly sure I did this, there is a possibility I created this from XCP-ng Center)
2. XCP-ng Guest Tools is not installed at this point
3. Go to the Console tab in the VM within XO
4. Can't connect to the VM as it has no IP address
5. Can only get an IP Address once Guest Tools is installed

Am I missing something obvious? Bit of a catch 22 conundrum.

I'm going to re-test this by repeating Step 1 as I'm not 100% sure which way I did this.

@ronivay I see. I was having a test of resizing the partition and file system the other day and the guide I was following online for Debian 10 didn't seem to do anything when I followed the guide.

Perhaps I just found a bad guide. I'll do some more Googling now I know that I need to perform these additional steps.

I assumed that it was simply a case of expanding the disk attached to the VM within XO/XOA then everything else was taken care of.