XCP-ng support

[Gostev]

Hi, Olivier. Nothing you can do at the moment, Veeam simply has different business priorities at the moment and R&D resources are needed elsewhere. Thanks

[olivierlambert]

Okay, keep me posted when you decide to change the priority

[Gostev]

Thanks for your kind offer! I hope we can take you up on it one day... I never say never about anything these days.

R&D has nothing against adding support for XCP-ng (or any other hypervisor for that matter), it really comes down to the immediate priorities being different for the business, and we have to obey

[wally.nl]

We're a 35k students university and are already testing with proxmox and XCP-ng as the VMware quotes were simply mindblowing. Just asking what others are planning to use on XCP-ng since veeam seems to have other priorities at the moment and the newly release XCP-ng 8.3 seems nice. I've seen commvault mentioned but that is pretty pricey and left open wounds in our backup team years ago in the days of our on-premise sharepoint farm so I'm hoping for better alternatives.

[billcouper]

@wally.nl We are using the integrated XO backup. It is functional. Extremely basic. No fruit. Very careful consideration needs to be made in regards to frequency of full backups, as there are no synthetic methods in XO backups (like the awesome block-cloning that Veeam supports). File-level restore can only be unlocked at the higher license tiers. Backup scheduling is less than ideal (no GFS schedules unless you overlap them, which then generates backup failure emails).

Speaking of incremental backup requiring higher license tier... this is actually pricing Vates out of the picture in most SMB quotes for us lately. For a typical 1-3 host SMB (so NOT including NFR, NFP, EDU or other discounted licenses) we are finding that the VMware Essentials licencing is cheaper than Vates Essential+, even when considering the additional cost of Veeam on top. So... VMware+Veeam < Vates on pricing. Hmm.

[flakpyro]

@wally.nl we are using the built in XO backups currently but are looking at Storware as they support XCP-NG, Bacula also has support for XCP-NG as well as Commvault as you have already heard. So are Storware seems the best and most feature rich. The current version connects only to XCP-NG hosts directly they plan to add support for Xen Orchestra intergration in a coming release!

We have also been a Veeam customer since around 2010 and moving away has been a struggle more so than moving from VMware itself has been, we had become very accustomed to the Veeam way of doing things.

[Gostev]

@olivierlambert devs have nevertheless finished research and prototyping of XCP-ng support which I requested to be done some weeks ago and today the team has presented me a fully functional XCP-ng backup and restore prototype based on Veeam 12.2.

And I just wanted to share with you their feedback on XCP-ng APIs, perhaps you will want to pass this to your team as it seems they did a fantastic job! Also, keep in mind this is coming from someone who was directly involved in our Proxmox integration development.

From what I can tell with what we implemented so far the API for XCP-ng has been really good, certainly better than Proxmox.

Everything we needed for backup/restore was available in the API and seems to work well, most notably hot-plugging and CBT retrieval. Also for the cluster management parts everything looks to be well designed as far as storages, VMs, disks, etc.

We didn't touch on everything with the prototype though, so I can't say anything with complete certainty.

Overall I would say my impression of the API is definitely positive!

[nathano]

That’s some impressive feedback from the devs.

Xcp is so much easier to integrate with shared storage, what a learning curve with prox!!!

Just need to sort out that 2TB disk limit

[olivierlambert]

@olivierlambert devs have nevertheless finished research and prototyping of XCP-ng support which I requested to be done some weeks ago and today the team has presented me a fully functional XCP-ng backup and restore prototype based on Veeam 12.2.

And I just wanted to share with you their feedback on XCP-ng APIs, perhaps you will want to pass this to your team as it seems they did a fantastic job! Also, keep in mind this is coming from someone who was directly involved in our Proxmox integration development.

Thank you very much for the input. Yes, the API is basically why we did Xen Orchestra in the first place, it's very complete and allows to make things quickly on top. Happy to see you have a working prototype, and again, if you team need anything, we are happy to share our experience using this API in the last 10y for orchestra and backup too. I'd love to get an official support to grow our ecosystem, so keep me posted!

[olivierlambert]

That’s some impressive feedback from the devs.

Xcp is so much easier to integrate with shared storage, what a learning curve with prox!!!

Just need to sort out that 2TB disk limit

It's actively worked on (just hang on for some weeks/few months at worst). Our goal is to also keep it compatible with the export/backup API so even for VEEAM it would be no effort to plug on this.

[anthonyspiteri79]

Great to see this @olivierlambert!

[stevil]

Great to see xcp-ng getting the attention it deserves here!

[vkeven]

Would love to see Veeam support for XCP-NG ! Xapi was used by Citrix and their Xen Hypervisor product also , https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-api/

[flakpyro]

This is great news. This would keep us using Veeam as our main backup solution!

[JosephG]

Hi, is there a roadmap for this to be released.
Our VMware contract has just ended, and we would like to move to XCP-NG. But don't want to move until Veeam is integrated.

[Gostev]

Hi, not at the moment.

[kivanov]

Hello,
We migrated to XCP-ng almost a year from now, already and we are onboarding our clients to it. Most of them are using Hyper-V/VMware together with Veeam B&R. It would be great if there is native integration between xcp-ng and veeam b&r, so we can do the migrations much easier. In the upcoming 2025 we expect to onboard at least 3 clients with big infrastructures to migrate from hyper-v/vmware to XCP-ng.