After four years of development, the release of XCP-ng 8.3 has been published, which advances a free and open-source alternative to the proprietary XenServer platform for deploying cloud infrastructure and managing its operations. XCP-ng restores functionality that Citrix removed from the free version of Citrix Hypervisor/XenServer starting with version 7.3 and allows for quick deployment of server and workstation virtualization, offering tools for centralized management of an unlimited number of servers and virtual machines. A 640 MB installation image has been prepared for download.
Among the features of the system are: the ability to combine multiple servers into a pool (cluster), high availability (High Availability) support, snapshot capabilities, and shared resource management through XenMotion technology. Live migration of virtual machines between cluster hosts and between different clusters/individual hosts (without shared storage) is supported, as well as live migration of VM disks between storage. The platform can work with a large number of storage systems and boasts a simple and intuitive interface for installation and administration.
It is noted that the XCP-ng 8.3 branch will be the last in the 8.x series, and the next release will be 9.0, which will mark the project's shift from mimicking XenServer to realizing its vision of platform construction. XCP-ng 9.0 will focus on use cases that the XenServer project did not pay attention to, such as providing tools for migration from VMware platforms.
Among the main changes in XCP-ng 8.3 are:
- The platform includes the web interface XO Lite, which implements a simplified version of the Xen Orchestra web interface. Operations such as navigation through pools, hosts, and virtual machines, access to virtual machine consoles, monitoring, access to statistics, tracking resource consumption, managing the lifecycle of virtual machines (starting, stopping, migrating, deleting, creating snapshots), filtering and sorting lists of virtual machine objects, and opening consoles in a separate window. By the end of the year, features for creating virtual machines and managing networks are planned to be added.
- A new theme has been implemented for the xsconsole command line interface.
- A new splash screen has been added, shown during boot and shutdown.
- Support for virtual TPMs (vTPM, virtualized Trusted Platform Module) has been added, allowing for the launch of Windows 11 in virtual machines.
- Full support has been implemented IPv6 on the host system side (Dom0), which can be used in the management interface, storage, and for network booting of virtual machines. Three operating modes are available: IPv6 only, IPv4 only, and IPv4+IPv6. IPv6 support has also been added to the installer.
- Hardware support has been expanded, with drivers igc and r8125 added for Intel i225 network adapters and devices based on Realtek RTL8125 chip. The largeblock driver has been added for efficient handling of disks with physical 4K sectors.
- Handlers have been added to the XAPI API for remote management of PCI device passthrough in virtual machines.
- When creating snapshots of virtual machines, it is now allowed to exclude individual disks, which can help save space by not including disks with temporary and renewable data like caches, swap partitions, and backups in the snapshot.
- The ability to compress data during live migration has been added.
- An XAPI plugin has been added to show the status of disks using the smartmontools package.
- The ability to use certificates for verifying the content of virtual machine pools has been added.
- Management of OpenSSH keys and ciphers has been simplified.
- An option has been added to close network port 80 to restrict access to the management interface.
- The ability to view VLANs has been added to xsconsole.
- New virtual machine templates have been added. Default templates for Linux systems using BIOS and UEFI have been introduced.
- Python scripts have been rewritten using Python 3.
Source: opennet.ru
