Developers of XCP-ng, developing a free and free replacement for the proprietary cloud infrastructure management platform XenServer (Citrix Hypervisor), have announced that they are joining the Xen project, which is being developed as part of the Linux Foundation. Moving under the wing of the Xen Project will allow us to consider XCP-ng as a standard distribution for deploying a virtual machine infrastructure based on the Xen hypervisor and XAPI.
Merging with the Xen Project will allow XCP-ng, as an end-user distribution, to become a bridge between users and developers, and to ensure that XCP-ng users continue to follow the original principles of the project in the future (not become a limited commercial product, as happened with Xenserver). The merging will not noticeably affect the development processes used in XCP-ng.
At the same time, a beta release of XCP-ng 8.1 was proposed for testing, which recreates the functionality of Citrix Hypervisor 8.1 (formerly called XenServer). Upgrading XenServer to XCP-ng is supported, full compatibility with Xen Orchestra is provided, and virtual machines can be moved from XenServer to XCP-ng and vice versa. A 530 MB installation image has been prepared for download.
The installation images of the new release are based on the CentOS 7.5 package base using the Linux 4.19 kernel and the Xen 4.13 hypervisor. The most notable change in XCP-ng 8.1 was the stabilization of support for booting guest systems in UEFI mode (Support for Secure Boot has not been ported, as it is tied to proprietary code). In addition, the performance of importing and exporting virtual machines has been improved.
in XVA format, improved storage performance, added new I/O drivers for Windows, added support for AMD EPYC 7xx2(P) chips, uses chrony instead of ntpd, deprecated guest support in PV mode, new local storage now uses FS by default Ext4, an experimental module for ZFS, has been updated to version 0.8.2.
Recall that Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer) and XCP-NG allow you to quickly deploy a server and workstation virtualization system, offering tools for centralized management of an unlimited number of servers and virtual machines. Among the features of the system: the ability to combine multiple servers into a pool (cluster), high availability (High Availability), support for snapshots, sharing shared resources using XenMotion technology. Supports live migration of virtual machines between cluster hosts and between different clusters/individual hosts (without shared storage), as well as live migration of VM disks between storages. The platform can work with a large number of storage systems and is distinguished by the presence of a simple and intuitive interface for installation and administration.
Source: opennet.ru