@stormi Installed all of the test updates on my three-host home-lab this weekend. Similar configuration to @gskger 3 x Dell OptiPlex 7040 SFF hosts and home-built FreeNAS server with separate physical 1Gb networks for management, storage and migration. I call it my "Tiny Cluster" due to its diminutive footprint. I use it for configuration prototyping. Intel VPRO AMT on Xen hosts and storage server enables headless console operation using MeshCommander (think poor man's iDRAC). All updates were installed without issue. Backups and restores seem to work just fine. Of special interest to me was the UEFI Secure Boot capabilities. Installed the x64 dbx.auth from uefi.org (I presume since XCP-ng is 64-bit that that was the correct choice. Probably should be made explicit in the instructions.) Seems to work perfectly. I tested with Windows 10-20H2 and Windows 10-21H1. Also tested with RHEL 8.4 which has built-in support for secure boot (Microsoft-signed bootloader shim) and that too "just works." The varstore-ls <VM-uuid> command shows PK, KEK, dbx and db in the store as expected. Stops unsigned bootloader as expected on unsupported OSes. Looks great! Thank you for all of the work you've put into it. I suspect designing and building emulated system firmware is not for the faint of heart . . . Very impressive!

Applied latest candidate test updates to 3 x Dell OptiPlex 7040 (i7-6700, 48GB, 10Gbps-attached TrueNAS shared-storage) pool. Update process was error-free and successful. Everything appears to be working normally following the update.

Latest version 8.3 candidate updates installed and are working fine on three-host home lab pool. Received a couple of repo errors for a certain mirror, but yum tried another mirror and it completed successfully. After updates were applied, performed live migrations between hosts with no problems and updated a Windows 11 Version 24H2 VM to the November 2024 cumulative update without problems. (VM is currently running Citrix Tools 9.3.2 without issues.)

Applying the latest XCP-ng 8.3 RC2 "xen-*" and intel-microcode updates from the candidate repository worked great here as well. Everything appears to be running well.

Latest updates over ISO-installed 8.3 RC2 worked fine for me. I did experience one host in my three-host pool to which no VMs could be migrated. After looking at the networking from bash in DOM0, it showed that both 10G ports for the storage and migration networks were DOWN. These ports are on a genuine IBM-branded Intel X540-T2 card I bought used on eBay so it might have gone bad. Since the card has worked well for some time, I figured it couldn't hurt to re-seat it in the PCIe slot. Sure enough, that fixed it. Moral of the story: check the mundane stuff first; it's not always the fault of new updates.

Upgraded 3-node pool (home lab: Dell OptiPlex 7040 SFF x 3) from 8.3 RC1 to 8.3 RC2 using bootable ISO. It worked perfectly for me. As others have noted, it does ask you to select the management interface when upgrading the slave nodes. Once you do that, it automatically populates all of the previously configured network parameters for that host so you are really only confirming the existing values. The OptiPlex 7040's (i7-6700) all have Intel VPro AMT so they are running headless. The MeshCommander program is used to access the VPro console on each host. A DisplayPort display emulator dongle is needed to keep the integrated-GPU active in order to be able to see the console and firmware setup screens with this configuration. It's effectively a poor man's iDRAC. So far, everything is working well on 8.3 RC2.

@stormi All new patches applied fine. No apparent problems identified so far.

@beshleman I tried the latest testing update @stormi published with the updated SB support and it does indeed work properly including allowing installation of Windows Update KB4535680 on Server 2019 as previously cited. Also--a big thank you for adding the default parameter values for the improved secureboot-certs install command. Less is more. Very nice!

@beshleman So, after yum --enablerepo=base install python-requests on each of my hosts, secureboot-certs install default default default latest works perfectly. (Cool that it installs certs to each host in the pool with one invocation from any pool host.) Interesting that it doesn't install the three files to /var/lib/uefistored until you secure boot a vm on each host. I went looking for them and was initially confused because they were only written to the pool db. Serves me right for looking under the hood! Looks like XCP-ng secure boot is ready for prime time. Great job!

@stormi So far, I have tested a fresh install using software RAID mirror creation. Works fine. Also, noticed the new EFI boot kludge to correct missing bootloader on Dell and other faulty UEFI firmware. (I used to always add the /boot/efi/EFI/boot/bootx64.efi file to correct this since it also occurs on my ASUS-motherboard machine.) That works well. The newly refreshed secureboot-certs install default default default latest command is not working. The requests python module is not being found. BTW, I think the default option where the command is secureboot-certs install should be equivalent to adding default default default latest parameters @beshleman . I'll continue to test and report back later.

Applied latest candidate test updates to 3 x Dell OptiPlex 7040 (i7-6700, 48GB, 10Gbps-attached TrueNAS shared-storage) pool. Update process was error-free and successful. Everything appears to be working normally following the update.

Latest version 8.3 candidate updates installed and are working fine on three-host home lab pool. Received a couple of repo errors for a certain mirror, but yum tried another mirror and it completed successfully. After updates were applied, performed live migrations between hosts with no problems and updated a Windows 11 Version 24H2 VM to the November 2024 cumulative update without problems. (VM is currently running Citrix Tools 9.3.2 without issues.)

Applying the latest XCP-ng 8.3 RC2 "xen-*" and intel-microcode updates from the candidate repository worked great here as well. Everything appears to be running well.

Latest updates over ISO-installed 8.3 RC2 worked fine for me. I did experience one host in my three-host pool to which no VMs could be migrated. After looking at the networking from bash in DOM0, it showed that both 10G ports for the storage and migration networks were DOWN. These ports are on a genuine IBM-branded Intel X540-T2 card I bought used on eBay so it might have gone bad. Since the card has worked well for some time, I figured it couldn't hurt to re-seat it in the PCIe slot. Sure enough, that fixed it. Moral of the story: check the mundane stuff first; it's not always the fault of new updates.

Upgraded 3-node pool (home lab: Dell OptiPlex 7040 SFF x 3) from 8.3 RC1 to 8.3 RC2 using bootable ISO. It worked perfectly for me. As others have noted, it does ask you to select the management interface when upgrading the slave nodes. Once you do that, it automatically populates all of the previously configured network parameters for that host so you are really only confirming the existing values. The OptiPlex 7040's (i7-6700) all have Intel VPro AMT so they are running headless. The MeshCommander program is used to access the VPro console on each host. A DisplayPort display emulator dongle is needed to keep the integrated-GPU active in order to be able to see the console and firmware setup screens with this configuration. It's effectively a poor man's iDRAC. So far, everything is working well on 8.3 RC2.

Serious movement appears to be happening with respect to NV. See videos below cross-posted from this forum thread:

https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/8932/hardware-assisted-virtualization-is-not-enabled-on-this-host-even-though-platform-exp-nested-hvm-true-is-set/52

Nested Virtualization (X86) Part I - George Dunlap, Xen Server:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jKGYY1Bi_o

Nested Virtualization (X86) Part II - George Dunlap, Xen Server:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MxWvVTmY1s

@abudef Thank you for providing these links to George Dunlap's Xen Summit nested virtualization talk. It was very informative and also demonstrates a strong commitment to bringing NV to Xen Hypervisor and its derivatives. Particularly in light of Broadcom's acquisition of VMware and the resulting customer exodus, adopting XCP-ng and Vates looks to be an increasingly smart play. I will cross-post the provided links to the big NV thread on here.

Applied recent 87 updates to 3-node home-lab pool running XCP-ng 8.3 using XO from source on the latest commit. The update worked perfectly and a mix of existing Linux and Windows VMs are running normally after the update.

@doogie06 Thank you too! I also have XO setup for self-signed TLS access. I knew about the xo-cli task deletion command, but always had to disable TLS in my /root/.config/xo-server/config.toml file and then restart xo-server.service to delete the orphaned tasks. The allowUnauthorized parameter was just what I needed. That's why this community is really wonderful. Thanks again.

@julien-f @olivierlambert I've said it before and I'll say it again: "Wow, that was fast!" You guys do more to foster international cooperation than most of our planet's governments. Keep up the great work. Thank you Vates for creating, maintaining and improving this fantastic software!