Hi everyone,

I just installed this 8.2.1 a Dell R630 and the installer was very smooth.
We chose to make a new installation since the host was running XS 7.2 and we wanted a fresh install, with that came the opportunity to leverage EXT and thin provisioning which seems to work just as it should.

We're also mounting a NFS SR for VM disks which works fine as well. I'll have to wait and see, but hopefully the problem with /var/log/snmpd.log is resolved now and no more alerts regarding disk usage

We're using Veeam for our VMware platform and XOA for our XCP platform and I have to say I prefer XOA. Why may one ask?
Well it is dead simple, its not bloated, you have a ton of options when it comes to configuration, destination, scheduling and so on.

Veeam on the other hand is A LOT faster, we're using a 10G link to our backup site and we're seeing speeds over 7Gbit/s when backing up our VMware platform and I know this is something Vates is working hard on improving in XOA.
Veeam also has application aware backups which is a big deal when you're running MSSQL inside your VM's - I dont think there is any plans from Vates in supporting this and this might be a big deal for customers comming from the VMware and Veeam-side.

According to Microsoft you need to use their built in backup feature or a software that supports AD and VSS which will tell the VM OS that it is going to be backed up.
Unless you do this there might be corruption of the AD Databases according to Microsoft.

ALL THO we've been backing up our AD servers with XOA snapshots (Both normal backup and incremental) and had only 1 issue since we started using XOA in 2016.
Since that issue we also use a guest agent (From Ahsay CBS) that makes a Windows System State backup and Windows System Backup.

More info about that can be found here:

https://wiki.ahsay.com/doku.php?id=public:version_9:client:9447_system_state_backup_vs_system_backup

A great opportunity for anyone who is into xcp, xoa and opensource software to join a great company

@olivierlambert said in XCP-ng 8.2.1 (maintenance update) - ready for testing:

Thanks a lot @nikade for your feedback! (also I love your avatar!)

Yeah, I gotta have my suit on my tux

I wanted to inform that I've tried iSCSI with multipathing as well and it works fine.
So far everything we need in our general production-environment seems to be working as it should.

@blackliner said in Sdn controller and physical network:

@nikade How do you "pair" the XCP-ng SDN with your routing setup?

You cant/dont, you'll have to setup each private network on the vyos router and then have the vm private network routed through it manually.

For example if you have private network 1 with subnet 192.168.1.0/24 you'd have to add this network to the vyos router and assign 192.168.1.1/24 on the router.
Then set 192.168.1.1 as default gateway in your vm's which uses this network.

Then you'll setup ospf or bgp on the vyos router manually with your upstream border/core-router or firewall. If the subnet is a private subnet you'll need to setup NAT as well somewhere before it reaches internet to NAT traffic from 192.168.1.0/24.

@Greg_E said in What should i expect from VM migration performance from Xen-ng ?:

@nikade

I've spent a bunch of time trying to find some dark magic to making the VDI migration faster, so far nothing. My VM (memory) migration is fast enough that I'm not concerned right now. and don't have any testing to show for it.

Currently migrating the test VDI from storage1 to storage2 (again) and getting an average of 400/400mbps (lower case m and b). If I do three VDI at once, I can get over a gigbit and sometimes close to 2 gigabit.

It's either SMAPIv1 or it is a file "block" size issue, bigger blocks can get me benchmarks up to 600MBps to almost 700MBps (capital M and B) on my slow storage over a 10gbps network. Testing this with XCP-NG 8.3 release to see if anything changed from the Beta, so far all is the same. Also all testing done with thin provisioned file shares (SMB and NFS). If I could get half my maximum tests for the VDI migration, I'd be happy. In fact I'm extremely pleased that my storage can go as fast as it is showing, it's all old stuff on SATA.

I have a whole thread on this testing if you want to read more.

You can see the migrate which was 400/400 and then the benchmark across the ethernet interface of my Truenas, this example was migrate from SMB to NFS, and benchmark on the NFS. Settings for that NFS are in the thread mentioned and certainly my fastest non-real world performance to date.

That's impressive!
We're not seeing as high speeds are you are, we have 3 different storages, mostly doing NFS tho. We're still running 8.2.0 but I dont really think it matters as the issue is most likely tied to the SMAPIv1.

We also noted that it goes a bit faster when doing 3-4 VDI's in parallell, but the individual speed per migration is about the same.

@planedrop said in XO - Restore Health Check:

I can confirm this is the case for me too, not a huge deal, but would be kinda nice if it could keep track of the name.

Thanks for verifying, it is probably an easy fix for the vates ppl

Hi everyone,

Has anyone else tried the Restore Health Check-feature in XO to test their backups?
I've used it now in my lab a couple of times and it works great, but one thing that bugs me out is that the name of the tested VM is no longer dispalyed after the TEST is finished because it was removed:

Instead of listing the name of the VM it just says "VM not found!"

We're using XO from sources:

Xen Orchestra, commit 8b7e1
Master, commit 587da

@Dataslak said in After installing updates: 0 bytes free, Control domain memory = 0B:

@nikade @olivierlambert @stormi @Danp @yann

Just wanted to say to you all:

Thank you for your contributions and kind helpful assistance which has helped me through this crisis.

I would have been in deep trouble without you. I respect your expertise, and appreciate deeply that you are working so hard to help us dumb users. I have learned a lot, and hope one day to become skilled enough to at least help other new users on this forum.

Best wishes
Aslak

Happy everything worked out, this is what this community is all about.
I've gotten a lot of help and given some too, it's all about helping out with the things that you can.
With time you'll be able to help out more and more and more

@planedrop said in Veeam and XCP-ng:

@jasonnix I've done extensive testing with this myself, first and foremost, Veeam is the one that would have to support it, not vice versa.

Second, it would be best to use XO for the backups, it's much more fluid and is fully integrated, I've been doing this for some time and it's been excellent in multiple production setups.

I also have tested using Veeam via agents within the VMs themselves (this was just for test purposes, I'd still not really recommend it) and it worked exactly as expected.

Using XO for this is still better though, it's generally faster, easier to setup, more reliable, and much faster and easier to recover from backups.

If you are considering this as a comparison to VMware, it's worth noting that it's not really a positive thing that VMware requires you buy a separate product entirely in order to handle backups.

Well said, I totally agree.

@BHellman said in Let's Test the HA:

Disclaimer: I work for LINBIT, makers of DRBD and LINSTOR the tech behind XOSTOR.

We can do highly available iscsi targets, we even have guides on our website that take you step by step to do it. These would be outside of XCP-NG, but would serve the same purpose.

If there is any interest from Vates to integrate DRBD/HA into XCP-NG, we're always open to discussions.

Sounds interesting for pretty much everyone comming from VMware vSAN running SQL Server in a failover-cluster if im allowed to jump the gun

@456Q Hehe many didn't, but we pretty much had no choice because our customers expect a certain level of SLA and redundancy.
We looked very closely to XCP-NG + XOA since we're already using it for 2 other clusters, but since we were not able to resolve this SQL Server Failover-Cluster situation we were forced to build new vmware clusters instead.

@456Q said in Let's Test the HA:

Some time past and I like to pick up this old topic as I recently did some DR testing with XOSTOR as well. My pool is HA enabled and the VM configured to restart.

I started with some basic vm migration and reboot of hosts. Disk will sync and resync fine. I was not able to cause an error performing those tasks.

I further removed power from the active host to cause a serious outage. The VM became unavailable. XOSTOR shortly after enabled the disk on the other node and restarted my vm automatically.

I verified that no data was lost. Made some file modifications within the vm and powered up the other node again. It re-joined the pool and synced disk no problem.

Its pretty much the exact same behavior we are used to have with vSAN. I'm very happy with this result !!

I hope this helps someone that is looking for this kind of setup.

Stefan

Very impressive, we have about the same experience with vSAN.
The only thing stopping us from migrating from vSAN is that vSAN has native support for Microsoft SQL Server Failover Cluster which is a huge deal for many of our customers.

Maybe one day we'll use something else which enables us to migrate, untill then we're stuck with VMWare at work.
From a private side its XCP all the way!

@planedrop said in Backup / Migration Performance:

@KPS Regarding the 2TiB limitation, it'll definitely be nice when we have SMAPIv3 so we can go over this, but it's worth noting that IMO no VMs should be larger than this anyway. Generally speaking if you need that kind of space it'd be better to just use a NAS/iSCSI setup. Something like TrueNAS can delivery that at high speed, and then handle it's own backups and replication of it.

I know most probably already know this, and all environments are different (I manage one that requires a 7TiB local disk, at least for the time being, plan is to migrate it to a NAS once the software vendor supports it), but it's worth noting anytime I see the 2TiB limit come up, ideally it should be architected around so the VMs are nimble.

I do something similar w/ a pretty massive SMB share and TrueNAS can back this up at whatever speed the WAN can handle, in my case 2 gigabits and it'll maintain that 2 gigabit upload for 8+ hours without slowing down. (and I'm confident even 10 gigabit would be possible with this box)

We have 1 exception and that is for Windows file servers which is backing our DFS.
Except from those we dont allow VM's larger than 1Tb and if they're that big we do not back them up because it usually breaks and cause all kinds of problems.

Yeah totally agree, SMAPIv3 will bring a lot to the table.
I am excited to see what comes in the next few months.

No issue, just a known limitation.
With 4x backups at once we're pushing about 166Mbyte/s against our NFS over 10G, a single one is about 35-46Mbyte/s.

Same here, its definately a bug because I was able to do a backup and restore just last week.
I upgraded to the latest 2 days ago and now backups are broken, same version here:

Every once in a while we have had the need to deploy a new XOA appliance and it is as simple as others have pointed out, just backup config, setup new XO(A) and then just import config.
Works like a charm, only thing we may have to do is to check the plugins configuration, but nothing else.

@Chr57 Good job, always nice to have everything sorted out before going live