XCP-ng support

[Steve-nIP]

About SMAPIv3 and removing the 2TiB limitation: keep an eye open for a blog post next week

Where's the post?

[c.giesers]

A while ago, we had to choose a new backup solution. Sadly Veeam didn't offer (Citrix) XCP-ng support, so now we're running Commvault and paid quite some grand for that.
Could have been your money, guys. Speed up to not loose more potential customers.

Guest-Agents are legit for application awareness like Exchange, SQL etc. - but missing API support to cover the whole environment was - and is - a blocker.

[olivierlambert]

Where's the post?

Sorry I wasn't notified about your answer, there you go: https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2024/04/19/firs ... n-preview/

[olivierlambert]

An interesting news: https://vates.tech/blog/vates-recognize ... d-systems/

We are even now in the "Representative Vendors in the Integrated Systems Market" (alongside with VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft etc.), in addition on being in the "Market Virtualization Guide" since 2022

[franckehret]

Hi there,

My company is considering moving avway from VMware as like a lot of others, the prices are too high.
We still have time to choose the alternative but of course, we would like to keep a few things in place like Veeam backup.

So Veeam, please support XCP-NG, it is my favorite alternative so far!

[shofman]

Hello, like all other people, i'm trying VMWARE Alternative.
And XCP-ng is the closest to VMWARE for me.
Veam's support will be decisive to take this choice for me.

[inv]

Well, just saying "me too" should be enough. Many of us have been affected by Broadcom's intervention on vmWare ecosystem and i (like many others) have been looking for alternatives. Being a long-time user and fan of Veeam, it would be great seeing it adding support for alternatives to Broadcom's software...

[IronG]

I would like to lift this issue because we just got the question from a large customer to show a possible way to migrate away from vmWare to something else. We have suggested XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra and we have a few of their VM’s running today as test and so far so good.
Only problem is that they are invested in the Veeam ecosystem.
Their goal is to have migrated all of their branches away from vmWare to something else, preferably for us would be XCP-ng.

So my question is of there will be any support in Veeam for XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra in the near future, preferably 2024?

[Gostev]

Not for host-based backups. But you should already be able to use agent-based with the current version.

[IronG]

Thanks, appreciate the quick answer.
Unfortunately the customer doesn´t accept agent based backups so I guess we will have to take a diffrent route.

//Marcus

[olivierlambert]

Is there anything we can do at Vates?

[ecce2k]

Adding myself to this, would like to see XCP-ng support too.
+1

Just my 2 (or three) cents on some "versus" topics here:
Recently did some research on which way to go, management-wise XCP-ng is much more like VMWare, Proxmox is more like MS Hyper-V without System Center Virtual Machine Manager, as it lacks multi-cluster management and live migration features.
Yes, you might get away with Proxmox by creating one big cluster instead of multiple smaller ones, and enjoy live migration in the whole environment.
But what if you need to pool high-confidential VMs/normal VMs/exposed VMs (aka DMZ) on different clusters, or even have one separated by WAN and would like to migrate VMs between them?
XCP-ng has the centralized management and seems to have cross-cluster-aka-pool-migration features which can do that quite conveniently for quite some time (at least my quick search seems to have found the first mention of this in 2014, though I don't know if you still need to drop onto the command line or if it is already implemented in the UI).
Proxmox lacks this centralized management and its remote-migration feature seems to be still experimental and drops you on the command line for this.
Therefore XCP-ng looks to me more mature and enterprise-ready from this point of view.
For SMBs who do not need VM separation, and central management features, Proxmox might do for them.

Veeam and its WAN-replication, WAN-acceleration and tape support is one of the more important features to me, and the only environment that I can see that can bridge the gap for now without losing Veeam support and all cross-migration features is with MS Hyper-V and SCVMM.

Therefore, if I could I would add another +1 vote for xcp-ng support.

[Gostev]

If you're looking for a more enterprise-ready hypervisor then be aware that Veeam also supports Red Hat Virtualization and Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager.

[DE&C]

@Anton:

Because you wrote "more enterprise-ready": Your post suggests that RedHat and Oracle are “better” for enterprises and I would like to understand why / how.

• How are they "more enterprise-ready" then XCP-NG?

• Did you compare the solutions? If so, what were the requirements, how did you compare the solutions and what was the result?

My personal input

From small to large enterprise customers that we have or are in contact with are all looking for a way out of the VMware ecosystem or are preparing to exit when their licenses expire (1-3 years from now). None of them would ever use voluntarily anything from Oracle. Just look at the last 10+ years of what Oracle has done to “customers”, it was even worse than what VMware is doing right now.

RedHat is also high risk when you see what they did with CentOS and what strategy they may be pursuing. Don't forget that RedHat is owned by IBM, so you need to make sure you understand IBM's strategy too.

Therefore, an overall risk analysis should be done and a clear requirements should be set to clarify the need of the customers. From the requirements to what the new vendor's strategy is to the point of how they have behaved over the last 10 years. That's the reason we (and many partners we know) are testing XCP-NG and proxmox as a potential alternative to VMware. As long as a solution is not supported by Veeam (fully integrated and agent-less of course) an important eco-system is missing.

[Gostev]

I was replying to the previous poster who was looking for a more enterprise-ready solution than Proxmox. I was never comparing those hypervisor to XCP-NG, which I know very little about. Nor do I know of any of Veeam customers who are using XCP-ng at enterprise scale.

However I do know of some good size RHV deployments including at some of the world's biggest brands, so oVirt KVM based virtualization does seem to work for the enterprise.

Interesting observation though: I noticed that your primary considerations are extremely "non-technical"... while in my opinion, technology and its maturity should go before anything else when talking about migration off of VMware?

[DE&C]

To make sure there are no misunderstandings from my side, I re-read ecce2k's post again. I see his point about why he thinks XCP-NG is better suited for enterprises than Proxmox (@ecee2k: thank you for the insights of your evaluation). But I don't see any question from him as to whether there is something more “enterprise-ready” than XCP-NG.

Then I saw your statement and read it like “Oralces and Redhats solution are better suited for enterprises than XCP-NG”. So I was interested in your findings, because I value your opinion and technical insights. But if it was more like: there are two other enterprise-ready hypervisors - then I misunderstood your statement, sorry for that.

I think there are 3 main points here

• Maturity level

• Eco-system: like backup solutions, monitoring etc.

• Vendor strategy: are this vendors prone to milk their customers or maybe they have even done this before and therefore likely to do it again? Why should you migrate from a mature solution like VMware just to have the same political / strategic risk again, if this was the main concern in the first place.

This is the reason why I clearly point out that if you want to move away from VMware for “economic reasons” and “minimising risk for the future”, Oracle is out of the question – at least for all partners and customers I know. This is probably an off-topic discussion. The main statement is: "there are many in Switzerland that won't use something from Oracle or Redhat, therefore other options should be considered by Veeam".

[flakpyro]

Chiming in again to add at at least in Education (K-12/Higher ED) XCP-NG seems to be making great inroads. Our VMware renewal quote was insane and forced us to consider other options and i know others who are in the same boat in the industry. XCP-NG feels much more enterprise ready than Proxmox and so that's the direction we went. We have 47 hosts migrated over and each of those hosts were backing up VMs with Veeam up until this migration, now unfortunately they are not. The built in Xen Orchestra backup is decent but if Veeam support was there we would be renewing and continuing to use Veeam without question!

As Olivier pointed out since XCP-NG/XenServer both make use of " XAPI toolstack" for backups, building in support would add support for 2 additional hypervisors which in the current landscape seems like a no brainier.

I'll of course echo this feedback to our sales rep when they call me this fall about our renewal which we wont be able to make use of going forward anymore unfortunately.

[packetdog]

I was replying to the previous poster who was looking for a more enterprise-ready solution than Proxmox. I was never comparing those hypervisor to XCP-NG, which I know very little about. Nor do I know of any of Veeam customers who are using XCP-ng at enterprise scale.

However I do know of some good size RHV deployments including at some of the world's biggest brands, so oVirt KVM based virtualization does seem to work for the enterprise.

Interesting observation though: I noticed that your primary considerations are extremely "non-technical"... while in my opinion, technology and its maturity should go before anything else when talking about migration off of VMware?

@olivierlambert, without doxxing your customers- are you able to provide some examples of enterprise clients to help close the loop on this?

There's also tons of jobs hiring xcp-ng engineers online in the US. Heck, even Vates is hiring!

I would also like to take this opportunity to +1 the request for Xen host-level backup support. We use this in the SMB realm for smaller businesses who don't mind being on the very reasonable subscription cost from Veeam to ensure their data is protected. However, as we begin migrating these clients to xcp-ng/XenOrchestra, we will need to find a good way to re-engineer their backups.

Am I the big fish in the eyes of Veeam? Nope. Are there tens of thousands of other MSPs out there supporting hundreds of thousands of SMB to Midsized clients across the country? Yup. If you only figure on supporting the enterprise client, you'll do ok I'm sure.. but who's going to support all of the smaller businesses and absorb their $? Looks like CommVault and Unitrends already do. I'm sure Acronis, Veritas, and Axcient won't be too far behind.

[billcouper]

I think Xen as Hypervisor has no Future. All Big Player, include SUSE have change to KVM.

With the build in Feature to migrate ESXi VMs to Proxmox, makes very easy to go KVM based virtualization.

SUSE is a Big Player in the virtualization space? That's news to me!

PS.. maybe just me but with Veeam Agent restores, i can only get it to restore over the network at 100Mbit. I messed around with some nic drivers but never been able to get it working faster then 100Mbit which kind of sks.

By default Xen Orchestra selects the Realtek 8139 network adapter for VMs that you create. This is a 100Mbit adapter. That is why you're speed limited when booted from the Veeam recovery media. If you change to the Intel adapter on your VM, it will run 10x faster. Note that this doesn't make any difference at all once the OS is running correctly and PV drivers have been installed, as either Realtek or Intel will be replaced with the Xen PV adapter and run even faster again! There is probably a way to inject these PV drivers into the recovery media but I never bothered as the 1Gbit speed was acceptable at the time.

+1 for XCP-ng backup support in Veeam

We migrated many hundreds of VM's from VMware to XCP-ng using the aforementioned V2V functionality in Xen Orchestra. It was very easy and reliable. From many hundreds of VMs only one had a disk bigger than 2TB and the solution was to convert that disk to being provisioned via iSCSI instead of a virtual disk.

We chose XCP-ng over other solutions, including ProxMox, based on it's ease of integrating with fibre channel SAN multipath storage, multi cluster management, and the availability and capability of their support offerings. We are paying the absolute highest price, top-tier support offering, and it's a fraction of what we were paying to VMware. As a hosting solution provider, in our exact and unique environment and situation, XCP-ng is far more suitable than ProxMox.

Note that everyone's mileage will vary. I am not saying XCP-ng is better than ProxMox, just that it is sufficiently different that no one solution is the perfect choice for everybody. I implore you to do what we did and run up some test labs using production-grade hardware and see for yourself which solution works best for you!

We also stopped using Veeam to backup these VM's and now use the Xen Orchestra integrated backup. I wonder how much revenue Veeam has lost due to customers migrating away from supported hypervisors?

[barhum77]

Hello
We are considering replacing VMWARE with XCP-NG due to the large price increases of VMWARE and the fact that they canceled the discounts for education and academia
And we don't want to give up about VEEAM
Are there plans in VEEAM to support XCP-NG soon?

[david.domask]

Hi Ramzi,

I've merged your post with an existing topic regarding XCP-NG support. Your request is noted.

For now, you can protect the VMs with Veeam Agents for VMs in your XCP-NG environments. Thanks!

[Gostev]

Does anyone know what's the story behind the Linux kernel version used by XCP-ng? I'm perplexed why are they using a kernel this old.

[olivierlambert]

Happy to book a webmeeting with you to discuss the technical details with all the relevant persons in our team

[Gostev]

I was just curios about the outdated Kernel version, could provide any color /short summary on this here? This should be an interesting information for many community members in any case.

[olivierlambert]

It's a long story. Unlike KVM, the "host" is just a special VM ("Dom0"), and it's not handling CPU and memory. So the kernel is far less capital than in any KVM-based solution, because Xen is doing the heavy lifting (and security/isolation by the way, acting as a true 3rd party unlike virtio where it's DMA everywhere).

But sure, a more recent kernel might provide better I/O in some scenario (eg lib uring) but for the rest, you can backport almost all drivers and such. XCP-ng main target is stability. Also, there's some components that aren't upstream and harder to port in recent kernels, meaning getting a more recent kernel will be not only many tests to do (for the I/O part & modification in the storage stack to use them) but also the need to modify some dedicated components.

That's why we keep the "new kernel" possibility for a next major release, not a minor one: after 8.3, we'll aim a 9.0 built from scratch (well, not entirely, but you got the idea). In short, it's not worth it for now.

[Gostev]

Thanks Olivier, do you know when approximately 9.0 will be delivered? If you can share at least a year.

[olivierlambert]

It's really hard to tell, but not this year clearly (we are just in the early design phase), depending on how fast we grow (so far we are tripling the team size in 2 years but +30% just in 2 months now) but if we continue at this pace it could be somewhere in 2025. However it's not obvious and you can imagine it's different if I have a dedicated team of people vs spare time of my existing team. I suppose it would be more reasonable to target 2026 for any commercial release. In short, it's not worth waiting for it, considering existing release will be LTS/stable for a while. Serious people want stability and it matters the most to us.