XCP-ng - Installation with Xen Orchestra and XO Lite

With the release of XCP-ng 8.3 I thought it would be interesting to try XCP-ng in combination with Xen Orchestra to manage hosts and pools. I also wanted to try out XO Lite. For that I bought a small Asus NUC 14 Pro (i5 processor, 64 MB RAM, 2.5Gbe). If I like XCP-ng, I might be able to replace Proxmox that runs on much older hardware.

XCP-ng Installation

To a large extent, I followed the installation as described in the XCP-ng documentation.

1. Make sure the UEFI Allow UEFI 3rd party driver loaded option is enabled and the Secure Boot option is disabled
2. Download the ISO, you can find the latest 8.3 image here.
3. Create the USB media, for example with Rufus and make sure you select dd to write the image after pressing the START button.
4. Start the host and boot on the USB media and go through the installation process. Let me explain a few choices:
   • VM Storage Selection : I used thin provisioning (EXT). With thin provisioning you only use the space your VM has filled with data. With thick provisioning you use the space of your VMs disk(s) size. You can read more here.
   • Networking: I used the Automatic configuration (DHCP) option and did not select Use VLAN. Within my network (Unifi) I already added the host (based on the MAC address) as a device with a fixed IP address, so DHCP will pick this up. If you use VLANS you need to change the port of the host to the required VLAN, for example a server VLAN.
   • Hostname configuration: I used the same name as the network device I created (see above). DNS Configuration is Automatically set via DHCP.
   • System Time: Use default NTP servers.
     

Using XO Lite

After the installation has finished XO Lite can be used by browsing to the IP address of XCP-ng.

Xen Orchestra Lite is a lightweight version of Xen Orchestra meant for single-host administration, running directly from your browser without having to deploy anything, hosted on XCP-ng directly.

My idea was originally to create a VM for docker containers using XO Lite and then deploy Xen Orchestra via docker, but I found out that creating a VM via XO Lite is not yet possible, this functionality will probably work by the end of the year (2024). So as home user/enthousiast with a simple environment I decided to try out the prebuilt Debian 11 image, from this much appreciated repository , which has Xen Orchestra and XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater installed.

Screenshot of XO Lite bundled with 8.3 (the configuration has already taken place and the VMs have been created with Xen Orchestra):

Xen Orchestra Installation

As mentioned above, I used the prebuild Debian 11 image. This involves some trust in the maintainer, but after some research I made this choice as alternative for the docker container.

1. Connect to the XCP-ng host via SSH and login. I did use Putty.
2. Run the following command:

   sudo bash -c "$(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater/master/xo-vm-import.sh)"
   

   with these parameters:

   • Which storage repository? The option with the GUID and not default
   • Which netwerk should the VM use? The pool-wide network associated with eth0
3. Follow the instructions and browse to Xen Orchestra when the installation has finished.

OPTIONAL: It is also possible to try XO v6. Go to the xo-ce VM and tab console and run the following command:

cd /opt/xo/xo-server
sudo yarn run turbo run build --filter @xen-orchestra/web

Then browse to the Xen Orchestra URL and add /v6 after the url.

Using Xen Orchestra

1. Log in with the default credentials and change [email protected] to your own username and change the password. Also login via SSH and replace the password for the xo user.
2. Go to Settings > Servers and add the XCP-ng host with user root and enable Unauthorized Certificates.
3. For more information please see the Xen Orchestra Docs

Updating Xen Orchestra is easy. Go to the xo-ce VM and tab console and run the following command:

cd /opt/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater
sudo ./xo-install.sh --update

Install the updates when Xen Orchestra is not up to date with master (optionally create a snapshot of the xo-ce VM first):

Screenshot of the host:

Screenshot of the virtual machines, I’m using tags to represent the containers:

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