#xcpng — Public Fediverse posts

Okay #homelab enthusiasts, I am looking at building a virtualization host. I’ve just tried out #ProxmoxVE and I just don’t like it that much. It feels clunky and bothers me to upgrade to a paid model constantly. I guess its tight integration with KVM made it appealing but I need to evaluate #xcpng. I don’t like the UI of Proxmox.

Okay #homelab enthusiasts, I am looking at building a virtualization host. I’ve just tried out #ProxmoxVE and I just don’t like it that much. It feels clunky and bothers me to upgrade to a paid model constantly. I guess its tight integration with KVM made it appealing but I need to evaluate #xcpng. I don’t like the UI of Proxmox.

I really hate how #ProxmoxVE continually sends information popups about not being a subscriber. I think I might investigate #xcpng instead. The constant reminders are annoying. I don't have the money to subscribe but I would willingly donate.

I really hate how #ProxmoxVE continually sends information popups about not being a subscriber. I think I might investigate #xcpng instead. The constant reminders are annoying. I don't have the money to subscribe but I would willingly donate.

Chez Korben: "Vates VMS - L'alternative française open source à VMware qui cartonne"

https://korben.info/vates-alternative-vmware-open-source.html

Alors oui, c'est un article sponsorisé, mais en tant que responsable moi-même depuis 7 ans de XCP-ng, l'hyperviseur de cette stack, je confirme le contenu. Et c'est du "vrai" libre.

Si ça peut aider à faire connaître, pour éviter ce moment génant où un proche me demande "tu connais #proxmox" sans savoir que je bosse sur XCP-ng, ni que ça existe...

#xcpng #opensource #logicielslibres

At @bawuenet we're in the process of upgrading our #Xen #xcpng hypervisors to #uefi boot. Of course, we automate things and want to be able to reinstall our hypervisors from network boot. Our EFI netboot system is based on #ipxe which means it can only load EFI binaries. But xcp-ng ships the Xen kernel as a multiboot2 based image.
As probably one of the most weird ways to solve this problem, I've decided to chainload #grub2 from iPXE and learned a bit! 🧵

At @bawuenet we're in the process of upgrading our #Xen #xcpng hypervisors to #uefi boot. Of course, we automate things and want to be able to reinstall our hypervisors from network boot. Our EFI netboot system is based on #ipxe which means it can only load EFI binaries. But xcp-ng ships the Xen kernel as a multiboot2 based image.
As probably one of the most weird ways to solve this problem, I've decided to chainload #grub2 from iPXE and learned a bit! 🧵

At @bawuenet we're in the process of upgrading our #Xen #xcpng hypervisors to #uefi boot. Of course, we automate things and want to be able to reinstall our hypervisors from network boot. Our EFI netboot system is based on #ipxe which means it can only load EFI binaries. But xcp-ng ships the Xen kernel as a multiboot2 based image.
As probably one of the most weird ways to solve this problem, I've decided to chainload #grub2 from iPXE and learned a bit! 🧵

At @bawuenet we're in the process of upgrading our #Xen #xcpng hypervisors to #uefi boot. Of course, we automate things and want to be able to reinstall our hypervisors from network boot. Our EFI netboot system is based on #ipxe which means it can only load EFI binaries. But xcp-ng ships the Xen kernel as a multiboot2 based image.
As probably one of the most weird ways to solve this problem, I've decided to chainload #grub2 from iPXE and learned a bit! 🧵

Morgen muss ich mein XCP-NG-Shirt anziehen, um wieder herunterzukommen von #AWS ESC und dem #BSI‑Thread, und ein Statement für eine großartige europäische Virtualisierungslösung von @vates abgeben. 😌

Wir können in Europa nämlich auch IT und so …

#vates #xcpng #virtualization #opensource #awsesc #digitalsovereignty #xen

I figured out how to make a Fedora CoreOS template for XCP-ng that supports unattended installs by supplying an ignition file through Xen Orchestra's cloud config templates!

https://lethedata.com/blog/xo_fcos_template.html

#fedora #fcos #xcpng #xo

@dzwiedziu You haven’t mentioned #xcpng with #xenorchestra . It’s pretty good. It’s what I use.

Today was the last move. It is all in one rack. It’s all halfway decent. I had a major downtime though because I had a stupid #xcpng goof that required upgrading a server that had live workloads on it. I couldn’t migrate them off. That sucked.

But it looks ok now. And it is so much more compact. I am using some air filter fabric over the front door to filter the air. And I have the front facing inside and the back blowing out toward the outside. I figure the air is cleaner on the house side of the garage.

#homelab #selfhosting #nicerack

I'm going to admit that I am doing something immature in my #homelab and I'm looking for opinions. I've got multiple #XCPng hosts, all using local storage. I have no NFS or iSCSI storage. That's kinda silly. Shared storage is super useful and I'm literally not using it.

Unless I go to some serious effort to make a high-performance SAN, I expect network storage performance to be so-so for VM storage, but maybe I'm too pessimistic. I currently only have copper gigabit in the rack. No fiber, no 2.5G copper or anything like that. I'm not sure if that's going to be viable for NFS or iSCSI.

I could dedicate a host to running TrueNAS Core with a bunch of storage. But what has always bugged me about this is that my storage host becomes a single point of failure for all the compute nodes. #TrueNAS is super reliable but everything has to reboot once in a while, and these stupid enterprise-grade servers take anywhere from 4-8 minutes to boot. If I had a single storage node, and I needed to reboot it for an OS upgrade, everything would hang for a while. That's no good. Not updating the OS on the storage system is also not good.

So what am I supposed to be doing for shared storage on a #Xen cluster? How do I avoid a storage host becoming a single point of failure? How do you update and reboot a storage node, without disrupting everything that depends on it?

#selfhosting #san #storage

I upgraded #xcpng and I just noticed that it has some IPMI integration. It's able to tell a few things about power and temperature and display it at the bottom. It just discovered all these attributes. I didn't do anything to turn that on.

#homelab #selfhosting

Finally organized my thoughts into a blog post around the state of hypervisors in my home lab, with some new hardware. I also called out a few nice features of XCP-NG and Proxmox that I discovered while I was evaluating both of them.

https://medium.com/@a.j.longchamps/home-lab-hardware-refresh-september-2025-edition-3e50767b63e1

#homelab #hardware #hypervisors #ansible #automation #debian #kubernetes #learning #tinkering #proxmox #xcpng #minisforum

I've been on a little bit of a writing spree. I decided to update my guide on deploying K8s on XCP-NG/XenOrchestra with Terraform and Ansible.

I wrote one a little while back but done it quite quick and didn't follow a lot of best practices. I have since re-written a bunch of it and you can find it here: https://godfrey.online/posts/xen_k8s_ansible_terraform/

#k8s #kubernetes #ansible #terraform #XCPng

Well that is helpful. NOT! #xcpng

So, I wrote another thing. Deploying Kubernetes automatically with Terraform and Ansible on XCP-NG.

https://godfrey.online/posts/automate_k8s_cluster_deployment_with_terraform_ansible_on_xcp-ng/

#k8s #kubernetes #terraform #ansible #XCPng #xcp_ng

Installing XCP-NG on Apple Hardware

XCP-NG is an open source hypervisor platform; an operating system and tools to run virtual machines on a pool of computers, with a powerful web-based management interface. The hypervisor is based on Xen, with extensions to allow it to be managed by a CLI or the XenOrchestra web UI. If you’re familiar with VMware ESXi you’ll pick up XCP-NG very quickly.

XCP-NG will run on most x86 hardware, including those older Intel Apple computers you may have lying about that can be repurposed to set up a home lab or similar.

However, getting XCP-NG (either of the two long term supported versions 8.2.1 or the newer 8.3) installed and running may cause you problems, as the installer will always finish with what appears to be a fatal error. Typically it’s something like:

An unrecoverable error has occurred. The error was:Failed to run efibootmgr: Could not prepare Boot variable: No such file or directory

Not encouraging, right? But don’t worry, we can fix this. There are four steps to recover and get everything running the way it should be. But some serious things have failed that could leave you scratching your head: that root password you set during installation? Gone. The storage space for VMs you configured? Not there. Timezone and keyboard preferences? Forgotten.

First, shut down the computer and disconnect the installation USB. You won’t need it again, and having an extra disk attached might cause confusion. Then, switch on the computer and get ready with your finger hovering over the “e” key on your keyboard. As soon as the Grub loader menu appears, hit “e” and start using the cursor keys to move through the boot argument string. Look for “ro”; change that to “rw init=/sysroot/bin/sh”. What does that do? Instead of booting with the root partition in read-only mode, we’re going to mount it read-write (so we can make changes) and instead of running init to start the usual boot sequence, we’re just going to drop straight into a command shell. Hit C-x to save and continue booting.

When you get to the root shell prompt “#”, type the following commands:

chroot /sysrootpasswd

The first changes the environment for later commands to use the /sysroot jail, so that commands, shared libraries etc. can all be found. If you get strange errors that libc.so can’t be found, you forgot this step. The second lets us set the root password. Enter it twice, make a note of it and remember this process if you ever forget the root password again and need to reset it.

The usual commands to reboot won’t work as they talk to init, but there’s no init process running, just our shell. You might find Ctrl-Alt-Del lets you reboot; I usually resort to the power switch at this point. Turn it off and back on again. This time, let it boot up normally until you see the console screen:

Use the arrow keys, Enter and Escape to navigate the menus. Check the Network and Management Interface details are correct, if they are, you can probably ssh in if that’s more convenient. If you need to make changes you’ll be prompted for the root password you just set.

Next go to Keyboard and Timezone and pick the correct keyboard layout and timezone from the drop down lists.

The final problem is the trickiest bit. The system needs at least one SR (storage repository) to store VMs in. You probably remember during the installation phase being asked if you wanted it for thin provisioning (ext) or thick provisioning1. Without that, you’re a bit stuck, as you can’t set up any VMs, and the best way to manage XCP-NG is through XenOrchestra (usually XOA – the XenOrchestra Appliance), which you’d normally provision as the first VM on your server. You can create the missing SR(s) from the command line, by following the XCP-NG documentation. I did that once, years ago, and I didn’t take any notes. It’s not hard, just tedious and you’ll probably want to ssh in from another computer so you can copy and paste all the long UUID strings.

XenOrchestra is often deployed as the XOA appliance, but it’s just a web application and there’s a handy script to download the community edition sources and build it here: https://github.com/Jarli01/xenorchestra_installer

You’ll need a pre-existing x86 Debian/Ubuntu machine somewhere. If you don’t have one of those already, but you’ve got a new Apple Silicon Mac, you can install UTM and set up a Debian VM there. Just download a Debian or Ubuntu image from the Gallery, then follow the instructions for building XenOrchestra Community Edition above. I don’t think it works reliably on ARM/Apple Silicon yet, so you’ll need an Intel VM, hence using UTM.

One of the great things about XO is you can have multiple installations all talking to the same pool of hypervisor hosts, and can manage them from anywhere. It’s always useful to have a spare XO somewhere to let you manage your pool, so even though this XenOrchestra installation is a temporary bootstrapping step, I’d recommend keeping it around in case you ever need it again.

Log in to your new XenOrchestra web application, using the IP address of the computer you installed it on. The default login is “[email protected]” and the password is “admin”, you’ll want to change both of those at some point, but don’t worry about it just now.

Look down the list of options down the left hand side until you find “New”, and choose “Server” from the menu. Fill in the boxes – Label is the name you gave your server, but it can be anything meaningful. The address is the IP address of your server, username is “root” and the password is the root password you set above. Hit Connect, then approve the connection with the self-signed certificate. You can now manage your XCP-NG server easily.

Next go back to New and this time choose Storage. From here we are going to create the missing SR(s). Choose your Host from the pop-up list at the top, give your SR a name (eg “Primary” or literally anything meaningful – don’t worry too much about names for things in XCP-NG, they’re only for your benefit, underneath the system uses UUIDs, so you can rename everything at any time). Give the SR a description, again this is just extra information for you, so “Storage for VMs” will do. Choose the storage type; I recommend EXT for now, you can experiment with the other types later, then put in the device name to use.

If your Mac had only one internal drive the device is very likely “/dev/sda3”, but you should probably check. Log in to your server, either on the console or via ssh and use parted to check the partitions. One of them should be a very large unused one that uses up the rest of the disk. The installer usually leaves that as partition 3. If your Mac had multiple drives you’ll need to check whether you installed on sda or sdb. If your Mac had a Fusion drive (with a combined HDD and SSD) and you installed on the smaller, faster SSD, it’s probably sdb.

Click the Create button, and wait a minute. If you had a second internal drive, go back and repeat the process above for that other drive. You can just use the whole drive so “/dev/sda” or “/dev/sdb” will work.

You’ve now got a fully functional XCP-NG installation. Maybe go to Home / Pools / Patches and install any missing patches, followed by a restart before you start setting up VMs, then just follow Vates’ documentation to install an XOA appliance on your server and start setting up other VMs, access to any NFS or SMB shares you’ll be using to store installation ISOs or backups and set up your backup policy.

1. With Thin Provisioning, VMs take up as much space on disk as they are actually using, so virtual hard disks will grow as they fill up. With Thick Provisioning all the space allocated for a virtual hard disk is reserved in one go. Thin provisioning lets you pack more VMs on and makes them way more efficient to copy and move around. Thick provisioning stops VMs from growing and filling up space unexpectedly and is better suited to remote virtual disk storage solutions such as iSCSI, where you’re probably using a SAN. ↩︎

#Apple #Hypervisor #UTM #VM #XCPNG #XenOrchestra

#GPU-accelerated #VM on #Proxmox, #XCPng? Here's what you need to know
Two of the biggest beneficiaries of #Broadcom's price hikes, at least on the free and #opensource side of things, have been the Proxmox VE and XCP-ng #hypervisors.
In this #tutorial, we'll be looking at what it takes to pass a GPU through to VMs running on either platform, and go over some of the more common pitfalls you may run into.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/19/proxmox_xcp_ng_gpu_passthrough/

@willnix Try #XCPng. It is a fork of the old #XenServer code before it went closed source. I noticed you had #Citrix in your tags, so it could be a good fit for you.

Grrr. I just wanted to update #ovirt. Broke everything.

I think I'm going to switch to #proxmox or #xcpng or maybe just use #kubevirt

Homelab update:

Upgraded the Proxmox cluster from 7 to 8. Process went smoothly for the cluster, the only issue was a Windows VM had issues booting after migrating off a host for some reason. I'll have to do some troubleshooting there.

Set up the first node in a nested XCP-ng cluster within Proxmox. I think I installed XOA but need to make sure since each time I let the installation run the terminal times out and it logs me back out before I can see the result of the installation script. Need to find out where it installs the XOA listener for the web interface. Then I'll have to read up on how to get the rest of the nested XCP-ng cluster nodes up.

Anyone else running a nested hypervisor cluster? XCP-ng in Proxmox or any other nested configuration? Any issues?

#homelab #proxmox #xcpng #xcp #xen

I'm constantly in awe of all the things Linux and open source can do.

In my search to replace VMware ESXi, XCP-ng has been pretty amazing, if not a little hungry (since you need to run the web interface separately).

If I ultimately land here, I'd be happy.

#Linux #OpenSource #VM #XCPng #XenOrchestra #CentOS #Debian

How To Install Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA) In XCP-ng Server #XenOrchestra #XOA #Xcpng #Virtualization #Linux #Opensource
https://ostechnix.com/install-xen-orchestra-appliance-xoa/

Getting Started With XCP-ng Management Console #Xcpng #Xenserver #Virtualization #Linux #Opensource #Linuxadministration
https://ostechnix.com/xcp-ng-management-console/

How To Install XCP-ng Hypervisor #xcpng #xenserver #linux #virtualization #opensource #hypervisor
https://ostechnix.com/install-xcp-ng/

After updating #BIOS and #iDRAC and other firmware to the latest on my #Dell server, #XCPng 8.2.1 won’t start any virtual machines. The VMs previously ran just fine. The console now claims, “failed: hvm is required for this operation.” The server CPUs support VT-x and it is enabled in the BIOS.

This is an extremely frustrating #homelab experience.

After updating #BIOS and #iDRAC and other firmware to the latest on my #Dell server, #XCPng 8.2.1 won’t start any virtual machines. The VMs previously ran just fine. The console now claims, “failed: hvm is required for this operation.” The server CPUs support VT-x and it is enabled in the BIOS.

This is an extremely frustrating #homelab experience.

After updating #BIOS and #iDRAC and other firmware to the latest on my #Dell server, #XCPng 8.2.1 won’t start any virtual machines. The VMs previously ran just fine. The console now claims, “failed: hvm is required for this operation.” The server CPUs support VT-x and it is enabled in the BIOS.

This is an extremely frustrating #homelab experience.

After updating #BIOS and #iDRAC and other firmware to the latest on my #Dell server, #XCPng 8.2.1 won’t start any virtual machines. The VMs previously ran just fine. The console now claims, “failed: hvm is required for this operation.” The server CPUs support VT-x and it is enabled in the BIOS.

This is an extremely frustrating #homelab experience.

I replaced #VMware #ESXi with #XCPng in my #homelab. It’s been a bit rocky. The XCP-ng part seems fine. The #XenOrchestra part has given me all sorts of fits. It kept losing the connection to the underlying host, a Dell PowerEdge server, until I switched to the “latest” channel for updates and installed a newer version. (The workaround was to disconnect/reconnect.) I still get some occasional errors and problems. I can’t restart one of my VMs with XOA. I can’t type when trying to create a tag.

I'm going to move my lab from #ovirt to #XCPng.

I had to upgrade the disks in my storage server tough in order to free up some space as Ovirt is currently using iSCSI, and the iSCSI Zvol is taking up all the space.

I'm still debating if I should use iSCSI or NFS for XCP-Ng, but regardless, I need some free space to move the VMs out from the Ovirt zvol, into whatever storage type I use for XCP-Ng.

I used to run QubesOS somewhere around 3.0 RC1 back in 2015. I was impressed with how well it worked out of the box for a major OS project such as this. The only thing that didn't work on my machine at that time was automatic suspend/resume within the netvm.

I loved what @rootkovska was proposing with security by isolation, a much needed step in the right direction for secure systems.

Fast forward to today and the supported hardware has expanded significantly and many problems have been solved in the 4.1 release. The community has also expended and I saw @micahflee's HOPE talk in 2018: "Qubes OS: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even If You Get Hacked"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U8YbXKwog

If you're looking to join a community to learn more about Qubes OS I have a few resources. Hope to see you around!

1. Qubes Forum: https://forum.qubes-os.org/
2. Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Qubes/
3. Discord: https://www.reddit.com/r/Qubes/comments/zt5roz/qubesos_content_poll_vote_and_let_me_know_what/

#qubes #qubesos #infosec #privacy #opensource #infosecurity #computersecurity #isolation #community #hacking #whonix #xen #xcpng #xcp #virtualization #security

Thinking about setting up #ProxmoxBackupServer this afternoon to incrementally #backup my VMs. 🤔

Somehow sad that this is not included in #proxmox and you have to setup this separately.
Hmm but same as the UI #XenOrchestra for #XCPng.

#selfhosting #homelab

Something to occupy the weekend... testing out a new hypervisor release... for the most demanding environment known to humanity... the home network... 100% uptime needed to keep family happy!

https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/11/18/xcp-ng-8-3-alpha/
#Cloud #Xen #xcp #xcpng #XenServer #tech #uptime #network

Kann jemand kostenlose Virtualisierungsumgebungen empfehlen?
Ich stecke gerade so ein bisschen zwischen #XCPng, #proxmox und #vmware fest. Hat jemand Erfahrungen gemacht und mag mir helfen mich zu entscheiden?

#sysadmin #virtualization #boostpls