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.

[ask-post-evolve]

Hello!
+1 for full veeam integration of xcp-ng

Any updates on this?

I'd hope to see a sort of first integration of the "xcp-ng prototype" in Veeam 12.4-or-5 release alongside with a security update release prior V13
That features can be rolled out like this was proven with Support of EntraID backup....

It would be a good sign of progress in the "freedom of hypervisors" for vm backups as a Veeam customer/enthusiast.

[Gostev]

No updates. I will post here myself if anything ever changes in regards to native XCP-NG integration.

[coolsport00]

Posting here to add my +1 and to keep tabs on this topic.

I've only just begun to start testing on XCP-NG. If it works as good as I've read and seen in training videos, the only drawback from pulling the plug for me is Veeam support. Unlike others @Gostev ...I'm not ready to give up on you all yet. I've been using you all since the v3 (or so) days.

I am only in the pre-planning/labbing stage, so I do have some time. But this sounds quite promising. I know...no promises from Veeam, but am at least encouraged you all are seriously looking. For those who are also following this thread, like several of you commented, I am also a K-12 SMB. Pretty large networking backbone, not too big (23 Hosts) of infrastructure. Looking for stable iSCSI storage support @olivierlambert and immutability backup support (Non-negotiable). 2TB limit needs addressed, although thankfully not sure I have many (a few maybe?) VMs above that limit.

Thanks for listening Veeam. And thanks for offering the interaction Olivier!
Best.

[nathano]

@coolsport00 have you seen this? https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/10308/de ... w2-volumes

[coolsport00]

I didn't (not on those forums as of yet..will get there). Thank you Nathan

[tsukraw]

+1 for us as well.

We have a solid number of clients who are on VMware and looking to get off, and like others have said Veeam is the sticking point.
If we ultimately decide to go with XCP-ng we will be looking for a new backup solution.

[cibomato]

+1 for urgent need of native integration of Veeam B&R into XCP-ng!
Please integrate soon, since we have to migrate in a few weeks/migrate.

Thanks and best regards,
cibomato

[jerome.louis89fr]

Hello Veeam team, and specially Gostev .

With the new information of licensing on vmware, do you have any news for the integration of Veeam with XCPNG.

As VCSP we really waiting for that solution to start migrating.
regards.

[Gostev]

No updates. I will post here myself if anything ever changes in regards to native XCP-NG integration.

[cody.ault]

We do have a blog post and KB article on how you can leverage our Veeam Agents and some of the Xen Orchestra API's/CLI to collect information from the XCP-ng environment to automate some integration such as creating protection group/deploying agents and restoring virtual disk/registering VMs instead of going through the baremetal recovery method:
https://www.veeam.com/kb4703
https://community.veeam.com/blogs-and-p ... erver-8994

[datpa]

Hello,

we are a happy Veeam customer and also currently evaluating XCP-NG as an alternative to vSphere and are leaning towards migrating in 2025.

We currently rely heavily on certain Veeam features such as tape backups etc. which is why as of now we can not do the hard switch to XCP-NG.

We really hope that there will be full host / hypervisor level support for Veeam in the future.

Any updates on future plans by the Veeam team as they might arise would be highly appreciated.

Thanks a lot to both Veeam and XCP-NG teams for the great work on the products.

Best regards!

[cloudgrid]

We are a Citrix/Microsoft/Veeam service provider. Previously we were vmware service providers before they decided to kill all the smaller sp's. Anyway, we have been using Citrix XenServer for our vdi environments for some time. I have worked with XenServer since before Citrix acquired it and it is very stable and in my opinion more enterprise ready but Citrix hasn't really tried to move the ball forward here for whatever reason. But XCP-ng is based on Xen project and is pretty much the same thing. It seems the obvious candidate to supplant vmware in the smb market but more importantly for service providers.

Additionally, customers will want/need flexibility of platform and should not make the decision to go with any particular platform based on whether veeam is supported. I think Veeam should be agnostic and should frankly give customers the independence to pick their platform. Moreover, they should be freed from vendor lock-in by veeam allowing them to restore to any platform they need to. So customers can run whatever combination of hypervisors are required.

Service providers should be able to tell customers, we don't care what hypervisor you are running we can back it up or move it! Xen/XCP should be supported asap!

[Azza007]

Long time Veeam user and long time Veeam implementer, +1 for xcp-ng support. With what happened with VMware, we are trying to evaluate other hypervisors and having Veeam support xcp-ng would definitely increase its value.