Exploring XCP-ng from a VMware User's Perspective

As of today (February 12, 2024) VMware ESXi free is no longer available. 😰 kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107518?lang=en_US

Excellent video and very detailed comparison. Two things, their new UI is coming this year as is XO Lite which runs on the host and both address the more modern design look and feel. Also worht noting that not only can you move VM's between hosts in a resource pool, you can also move a VM between completely different resource pools. XO can connecting to many pools at the same time.

Great vid. Been using XCP-ng for many years, and like all the functionality. There is another GUI in the form of a fat client called XCP-ng center, which gives you much snappier response than the web web GUI of XOA. The parallel to this is the VMWare client of yesteryear. XCP-ng center can connect to multiple different unrelated pools to provide you with a single consolidated interface. So you can do pretty much everything with XCP-ng center and not have to run XOA, but XOA gives you the backup functionality. Finally, the only major issue I've run into is with purpose built virtual appliances for VMWare, migrating them to XCP-NG has proven unsuccessful in several instances.

This video is VERY WELL DONE! I had some of the exact questions that were asked and answered in this specific video. A lot of different sites or vloggers talk about the licensing but they don't explain it as clearly as Rich does.

13:20 - When taking a VMware snapshot with memory, it will stun the VM at the beginning of the process. This can be quick enough you don't notice, but I have seen it make the system unavailable for up to 10 seconds.

Gonna stock up on popcorn for the Hyper-V presentation 🙃 🍿

great video, worth noting that XCP-NG has a desktop application from the old Xen server - XCP-ng Centre that allows you to do a lot of the tasks & setup. You can also enable a XOA-Lite version by creating a simple html file. This provides a basic web interface.

need one of these against proxmox

Hey great video. I only started using XCP-NG around February this year. I was an ESXi home user and decided I wanted to try something else since we use ESXi and vSphere at work and it's always good to keep the brain ticking away. I deployed their XOA guest shortly after the install, then quickly went to work rolling my own XOA on a separate server. The instructions online were not complete, with many libraries not part of the installs. A little googling around found and fixed those problems. So far, several months in I am happy with the stability and speed on XCP but yeh it's not for everyone as you say, the UI takes a lot of getting used to. The backups though! That is worth the learning curve.

This is an excellent video! I'm already planning to move from ESXi in my homelab to XCP-ng. I personally feel that XenServer is going to be the VMware replacement that companies are looking for, and it is great knowing that there is an open source "version" of it.

XCP-NG works great until it doesn't. I used it a few years back and ran into two main problems: * Sometimes after rebooting the server, the mgmt interface would disappear - especially if the server was part of a cluster. No amount of cli commands would revive it. Time to reinstall (again!). * The VM disk files (VHD files) are written to a single directory using a UUID value. This means trying to manually recover a VM is very difficult since the VM name is not part of the VHD file. There is no per-VM subdirectory (like ESXi) - making it much more difficult to identify which VHD files correlate to which VMs (an especially important issue when a VM has multiple VHD files). My suggestion: Try XCP-NG, force it to break (hard power-off, remove a NFS share, etc), and then try to fix it. Only then will you appreciate the effort to get your server back. I am not saying XCP-NG is good/bad. Just make sure you know what you are getting into...

Should probably mention that if you are hard core enough, you can do everything from command line on the host, that includes all the VM creation and migration stuff. Also XO has a lot less white space on low resolution monitors like the 1280x1024 in my server racks. I for one don't care how basic it looks, gets work done then I move on to other tasks. XO v6 will look more slick, preview some of this by putting XOlite on the host but know that you can't accomplish real work in lite yet. Give them time, updates are coming pretty fast for this.

One major drawback of XCP-NG and XOA is the 2 TiB VHD limit. If you have giant SQL or File servers with one or two giant disks in ESXi, you're gonna have a hard time migrating to XCP-NG and XOA.

Great and informative video 💪 I’m trying out Proxmox as a replacement for VMware at my job, so I’m looking forward to the VMware vs. Proxmox video 🙏

XCP is a good start but it has some oddities/issues which you only really encounter with use. No USB passthrough support No SAS shared storage support If the first time you attach an iso is after booting the VM you have to reboot it again to have it fully install Guests without management tools installed can't have their network changed while running Some linux VM's can't be live migrated (notably Citrix Netscalers) No ability to browse datastores, even via the CLI You need to create a separate ISO SR You can delete a disk from a running VM without any warnings or file locks The free built in backup is not differential XOA consumes several GB of ram, which can be a detriment on very small deployments No easy ability to see what VM's are on what networks Very poor alerting, eg out of the box it will not send emails that a storage path is down. (seemingly they can only be turned on with xcp center)

Thanks for the overview... was very handy to give me a baseline understanding of XCP-ng and how it compares to VMWare. One thing prospective users should be aware of - no NVidia vGPU support for XCP-ng at the moment so if your environment needs vgpu support you're out of luck (unless you can live with passthrough)

Great video , as a 2 years heavy user of xcp-ng I can tell that only their UI is not modern and looks like an old fashioned open source, BTW also their new XO lite isn’t so modern and still need to have a massive polish

I've been trying this out as a way to replace vmware for my homelab. I ran across 2 issues though: 1) Multipath for iscsi isn't really there in XCP-ng. You can do it but have to drop to the console and essentially configure it manually. That's not too bad on a small scale but could be problematic at a large scale. There's also no thin provisioning on iscsi storage. 2) PCI Passthrough is similarly not available on XCP-ng GUI. You can do it but it takes manual intervention at the CLI level. Again, not a big deal for small scale but it could be on a large scale, especially if you need to shut down and migrate VM's with PCI Passthrough regularly. If they can get these working well, I think they have a big potential to take over a ton of marketshare from vmware, but I think those are pretty big roadblocks for enterprise adoption.

They are working on a new GUI. Hopefully development will speed up as companies jump ship and start giving their funds to vates.

"Giant Beard" That was so cute. :)