@Danp oh yes you are right . . . boot is 500GB and SR is 4TB, though I removed the hardware mirror and am just using the 2 4TB drives so I have a SR of close to 8TB. I think my problem has been that the hardware raid was not working well with XCP, and I also was trying to use some older samsung SSDs (also 500GB) both of which did fail a long test in the system diagnostics. So I have removed both of them from the machine and will see how things work now (after yet another reinstall because I was not having luck getting XCP to see the second 4TB HDD after removing the HW mirror).

@stevezemlicka Thanks . . . I do want to be able to use vnc to connect to the VM from my laptop and have the graphical desktop there. But through XOA/ XOlite I just want a user shell. I suppose that I should just not use the console at all in this case.

@Danp it turns out I had a typo that took me forever to find . . . 102 vs 192 in the gateway ip. The strange thing to me was that the internal networking was working (pings, connections, etc). But there's something in the xoa web site that could not make the connection to the server it was running on, which makes me think there is some kind of external communication going on for server connections. If xoa can ping the dom0 then why would it need the gateway to connect to it for the web interface? Anyway I fixed the typo after finding the error running ip monitor, and then everything works great. This was the 3rd or 4th install of xoa so I was getting a bit hurried . . . next morning it took 2 minutes to find the error. Now its registered and working.