Xen Orchestra - a web solution for XenServer

olivier

I think it's better to regroup a little bit all the recent conversations around XO in this topic (if it's fine?). It will be better for me to have one place to follow here than checking for new topics about it

Documentation

The first place to go before asking questions! https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/

Quick links:

Quick intro

XO is a kind of middle-ware between you and multiple XenServer hosts. It doesn't require any XenServer setup: it works out of the box.

With XO, you can manage, backup, delegate your XenServer infrastructure.

Business model

If you are a company and you want a turnkey solution with support: XOA which contains:

a virtual appliance with XO installed (nothing to do)
an automatic updater (one click to upgrade)
corporate support and full priority to fix any issue
QA is done on XOAs, code/dependencies are "frozen" between releases

If you are not interested by the turnkey solution, you can install it from the sources, you'll have ALL XO features, but no XOA features (the previous given list). If the solution begin to go in production in your company, we strongly suggest to get a XOA to avoid any source problem. It's also paid customers which help to continue to work full time on this

Things to know

You can complain about the UI, it's already planned to rewrite it from scratch in the next months
I'm the project leader (and CEO of the company selling it), feel free to ask me anything
We like to be transparent about how it works to build a project like this. Sharing thoughts is always positive.
I'm personally convince that more brains are working on a topic, better it is: tell me your needs or ideas, it's always a good thing!
I've got no problem with critics, go ahead
We are a very small company, 100% dedicated on XO. We don't have 100 engineer working on it (not even 10)

I'll keep to update this post.

Custom builds

Here, I'll post link to scripts/stuff from people here to create a functional XO installation quickly.

Keep in touch

We try to release every 15 days. I'll write at least one or two blog post per week here: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/

I put the new articles on Twitter if you want to follow: https://twitter.com/xenorchestra

If you are a XO user, reading the blog is really helpful to catch last features and how to's

scottalanmiller

That's for the recap! There has been so much XO discussion recently we need to recenter too!

stacksofplates

I like the UI haha.

olivier

@johnhooks We'll re-create it for multiple reasons:

we stacked a lot of features inside something not planned for that
so from a dev point of view, the code is messy
from a user point of view, it's not really coherent everywhere
we got perf issues for big infrastructure (1500+ VMs)

Thanks to our experience now, we can rebuild it from scratch with a LOT more in mind. It allows:

a nice refactoring from the dev point of view
using React+Flux for a fully component oriented software
thinking "components" is far far better for dev but also for building generic and powerful UIs
display only what's important

An example for the VM view:

And with a legend:

Be advised, that's a draft; we already made some changes since.

stacksofplates

That does look nice. It's not going to be that font though is it?

olivier

@johnhooks haha nope, that's something designed with Paper, IIRC (by my associate, who is ergonomist and spend our IT budget in Apple iStuff hardware )

olivier

Should be out tomorrow if we got no QA surprise in the release process: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/continuous-delta-backup/

DustinB3403

@olivier said:

Should be out tomorrow if we got no QA surprise in the release process: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/continuous-delta-backup/

I'm very excited to play with Continuous Delta Backups!

olivier

We packaged a binary for offline merging into XOA. You'll have to build it yourself because our version is not portable so far.

Clone https://github.com/rubiojr/vhd-util-convert, make and put the vhd-util binary inside xo-server/bin/

We didn't had enough time to make a portable stuff for 4.12

olivier

/teasing:

edit: blog post is out: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-vm-continuous-replication/

Currently in QA.

DustinB3403

@olivier

cd xo-server/bin
git clone https://github.com/rubiojr/vhd-util-convert
sudo apt-get -y uuid-dev build-essential
cd vhd-util-convert
make
ls
cp vhd-util ~/xo-server/bin

Appears to work, has the WebGui been updated with a new Backup title for Delta or no?

olivier

No new thing in the web UI for continuous delta, it's automatic. If you are on next-release, it should already work now.

edit: it's the same job/backup thing. So restart after update, and re-run your backup jobs. You'll see the oldest delta merged in the full.

DustinB3403

eh, I've completely forgotten how to jump to the next-release....

Not enough coffee.

olivier

Don't forget to copy the vhd-util binary directly in xo-server/bin. The vhd-util-convert folder is useless after the make!

DustinB3403

Think I got it.

Have to test. Does that look correct?

olivier

Yep.

olivier

Due to problem with XAPI and metadata import, I decided it's more safe to write ourselve a solution to avoid use of those metadata. XAPI team told me that the code around this is not in a good shape...

So postponed for Monday. Sorry guys, there is some stuff we can't guess before we got trouble inside XAPI ^^

edit: at least our QA pass is useful ^^

mlnews

Maybe time to update XAPI

olivier

@mlnews Problem is also in next XenServer version. So we'll have better luck to write our own solution/workaround for this!

DustinB3403

@olivier question for you.

I Migrated a VM from a shit-box XenServer, and it's running on the other host, but Xen Orchestra doesn't see this VM on the Host.

Any ideas?