1. Local export function for backup: that's because how XenServer/XCP-ng work. It can't push data, it must be pulled by something (XO here). We are working on XO Proxies to avoid useless data round trip.
2. If you download a VM somewhere without going with your browser, just use backup features and target a "local" remote. That's it.
3. Scripting: there IS an API inside Xen Orchestra, you can also use xo-cli

Technically everything is possible (even adding disk) but not with the XOSAN UI.

If you want more flexibility, I suggest you wait for XOSANv2.

Hi!

1. This won't affect perfs a lot, the host itself doesn't use a lot of IOPS
2. No, it's not really trivial with the current XOSAN technical "bricks" used
3. It's not per disk but per SR (one SR used per node)
4. You can grow it by adding node, not disks locally (that's a current limitation of XOSAN)

Also, now we got more knowledge on the dom0, we planned to make a new version of XOSAN in the future to remove XOSANv1 limitations, which are:

• growing only with nodes, not by disks on the local node
• limited 4k IOPS perfs
• chicken/egg problem if you boot all your infrastructure at once (XOSAN VM must be up, so it might be needed to manually plug to storage)

everything within XO pushes the end administrator to setup a pool

What?

The key is automatically migrating those VMs

What?

If you search something close to the embed world, I would suggest Xen hypervisor on a lightweight distro available (Alpine Linux?)

XCP-ng contains tools for general purpose virt platform, with XAPI, OpenvSwitch and other "large" tools useful outside embed world.