How I host Virtual Machines in my HomeLab - Open Source Xen Orchestra Overview

all right how's it going y'all so today I'm going to be talking about Zen Orchestra and xcpng which is by far my favorite hypervisor and what I use to run all my virtual machines across multiple servers including even client servers all completely license free open source so first off what is a hypervisor a hypervisor is essentially an operating system that you install on a physical server so it's actually the bare metal part that actually runs virtual machines so if I want to run a bunch of virtual machines I'm going to install hypervisor on there and that operating system its only purpose in life is to run the virtual machines and maybe do a little bit of Maintenance tasks like backups and sometimes even run some Docker containers and so that is what you use this for virtual machines are awesome virtual machines allow you to run a bunch of different Services all in their own isolated sections they're phenomenal for backing up being able to migrate from one to the other upgrade and manage all separately it is really powerful to run virtual machines because if you ever need to spin up a new instance of anything you can just do that and you don't have to buy a new server and so for most businesses I would recommend virtualizing every single server they have except for two things one the file server those just tend to run better when it's actually on a physical machine if you're running something like a Synology if you're running something like a Windows file server where it's just a Windows Server you can totally run that on a virtual machine but if you're really looking for the most performance having a file server bare metal does help a lot and to your router trust me you're going to run into issues if you virtualize your router and have it as your main router you can do it if it's a secondary router for specific things but for most people do not virtualize your router just because it can lead to some very weird issues and be very hard to debug and if the server goes down Boom the entire network goes down but for every single server other than those two things you should be installing them on a virtual machine so the first day you go ahead and you you go to Dell and you buy a r630 whatever instead of actually installing like Windows on that device itself and running a bunch of stuff on Windows the first thing you should install is a hypervisor and in this case it would be XC PNG which is the hypervisor of xcpng enzyme Orchestra which are kind of working together and so that way you can just add in as many different things in there as you require and so being able to backup restore and migrate things is just incredibly easy so if you start from that in the beginning it'll make your life so much easier because virtual machines are just really easy to manage all right and so now let's talk about what Zen Orchestra and xcpng are so up to this point I've been kind of talking about them as the exact same thing and we will continue that just because they're kind of two different parts to the same problem they're actually both managed by the exact same company so that they really go in line together but xcpng is the hypervisor it is purely command line and it is actually what you install on every single on the virtual machines it has no user interface and all you do is you could spin up and spin down virtual machines using it however that's a terrible idea doing it purely command line because you're going to mess things up so then you have a thing called Zen Orchestra which is a web interface for as many xcpng virtual machine managers hypervisors that you'd like to have you have hundreds even thousands probably they are used by Massive scale out Surfers because it gives you just a great single pane of glass to run all these things so whenever I'm talking about xcpng I'm talking about the actual hypervisor the actual bare metal and then Zen Orchestra is all the great stuff on top for actually managing so Zen Orchestra allows you to do things like spin up the virtual machines back them up see the networking add users to them everything like that you do through the Zen Orchestra web interface so that's the quick context for those two things so both xcp and G ends in Orchestra are totally open source xcpng is actually based off of the Citrix Zen server Citrix did a thing back in the day where they had a great low-cost hypervisor and then they decided Well we can make more money if we just double our costs and so they significantly started increasing costs while also decreasing features for some price groups and pissed a ton of people off but the thing is everybody was kind of locked in because they were using it and so they didn't really have any other options however Zen server was open source because it ran Linux and if you're open source it requires that anybody can use your source code as long as they are them also open source and so what xcpng did is they took the source code from Zen server and I believe they were actually yeah they were kick-started they came from Kickstarter and they just built Zen server but open source and so this meant that anybody could use it and not have to pay for the Citrix license then to manage it on top of that they went and they built Zen Orchestra which is phenomenal so Zen Orchestra is kind of the the web management interface and if you look on here it's got pricing in here and so this is the optional pricing that really comes down to having support all the things you see in here you can build on your own for no price at all because it's all open source so this is right here is like the official version that actually has full support you'll notice a lot of this stuff has support but as you can see 600 a month to manage all your virtual machines for a massive business even for the largest Enterprise it's not that much especially if it can save you from having downtime absolutely this is chump change to a lot of large businesses but the really nice thing about it is it is completely free for home lab and small businesses who want to try it and it's also nice to know that say one day they tried to pull a Citrix and say you know make a lot more money we've got a lot of market share let's just double our prices use it all right fine back up your current one and just restore it using the open source version by building it yourself so it's very nice and it's just I like having that kind of trust but verify knowing that even though they have you very locked in and you're in there set up you can walk away you don't have to keep paying them because it's all open source which is really nice so now what are the features of an orchestra and really Zen Orchestra does a few things phenomenally well probably what it does better than any other virtual machine manager that I've seen is backups having the Zen Orchestra backups is just absolutely awesome it is really easy to set up jobs you have Delta backups continuous replication file level restore that's only for the premium version Disaster Recovery rolling snapshots tons and tons and tons of stuff you can customize them however you like and they are very easy to restore from I've had a few times where I've had a hard crash and I've had to restore a virtual machine from a few hours ago it can be done all through the UI very very very easily the other thing it does great is it allows you to have multiple hosts so multiple actual physical virtual machine managers multiple hypervisors and still be able to manage them all on the same pane of glass so right here you've got them there's hosts and pools I'm not going to talk about that but pools allow you to have multiple servers all kind of all connected to the same thing so you've had five identical servers you could actually all have them as a high availability setup with pools and be able to move stuff in line we're not going to talk about that but it just allows you to manage all of your stuff really easily you add storage in and you can just see all of it it's also got really easy to understand performance so we look at the stats and look at them how they have been from the past few days and you can just see all of it really easily and load it on in it's got the ability to add snapshots which are awesome and so it's just really easy to use so this is what I use to manage all my virtual machines I have a backup task right here and I've got two different backups I've got a rolling snapshot for my databases that's just because sometimes you need to restore database a little bit tighter but then I've got a nightly backup which is a Delta backup every day to my main file server and so we can just look in and we can see a log right here of how everything has gone and if we need to restore backup it is incredibly easy it's going to find all the backups from all the remotes right here and we can restore them as required we can also export them and download them as we need to and it's just really great to have there's also the ability for file level restore where if you just need to grab a single file you can do that so right here I'm literally in the Maria DB instant and let's go to my backup and right here I can literally download I've got a Cron job that runs I can download this file just to my computer and I can literally restore the file exactly how it was to that machine not going to do it because I don't need to but it's got all this really really really powerful stuff they've got automatic Health checking that you can do as well really cool stuff here and it'll show you hey this one's detached I migrated my DNS server from one server to another and so that's why it's on the other one now and so you can just see all of this stuff in here really easily then it's got great templates and almost instantaneous clones of virtual machines so it supports snapshots for certain file systems and with those you can do a fast clone where you can spin up a virtual machine almost instantaneously because you don't have to copy the data on the disk it just uses differentials and so it's just got a lot of stuff here so let's see how it works so right here these are all the virtual machines that I'm currently running I've got multiple DNS servers I've got them all here you can see which ones are running on which hosts I've got two servers right now I normally have three and so say I want to update this I go in the console right here I can just log in I've got a nice web interface here and here is the actual virtual machine that I use to upload my videos because I lost my fiber internet when I moved and so uploads take a lot longer now so I can just RDP into this box right here and upload them on up and then I can also just easily reboot it and be able to just manage everything right through here if I need to expand a disk I can just shut the thing down and change the size to whatever I need and then boot back up and expand out the disk I can look at all the backups that we've got and just run everything through here it is really really powerful it's also got really easy networking where you can really customize out your network so I'm gonna go into the pool and you've got a bunch of different networking options you've got and so you can just attach things to different vlans very very easily so this stuff is really easy to manage and it's web-based which just makes it so easy and then say I need to spin up a new virtual machine so I just come in here hit new VM choose where it's going and I've got templates templates are phenomenal so I went in and I built a Ubuntu virtual machine and I set up with all my preferences I had my SSH keys I added the zabix server in there I added a bunch of specific configs that I'm going to want on every single virtual machine I have so all you need to do is just use that template and set how much CPU and RAM it's got whatever we want to do here I'm going to use the custom Cloud config right here that automatically sets the hostname as well as expands out the volume so you just choose your network so I'm just going to say main Network and if I choose the exact same disk where it already is which is on my fso2 I can do a fast clone so you're going to see that it's going to be instantaneous so by enabling this fast clone right here it's actually not going to copy that data twice instead it's just going to start up the same one and from then on it's just going to be differentials so when I hit create it's going to take a second but it's almost instantly going to build this thing just like that because it did not have to copy all the data that was on that disk instead it's just using the original snapshot and now it's just going to take differentials from there and I've also set this up with a cloud in it so it's automatically going to expand out the volume in a few things like that and it just makes it really really easy so now I'm gonna let this thing boot on up and we can just see a really easy interface there but we can also hide it if we need full screen another thing that's really easy is once you've got the Zen tools installed and so I installed these and tools on my template as soon as this thing boots it's going to be able to have the IP address and everything on there oh and another nice thing is it's got really great stats that you can just get to very instantaneously so you can just pop in here pretty quick and you can also go in and see a little bit more granular stuff by going into storage and we can see all the iops and the latency for both read and write so you can see we're peaking our NFS latency because we are booting up this virtual machine that's not been done in a while and so you can see that that's why it's taking a second to boot so now the cloud in it is currently running and we should be up so now when we go to the network we can see it right there just going to click the copy on the clipboard and I'm just going to sshn okay from the other video he's already got my SSH keys in there and boom we are right in there and it is just that easy and so you can see because that cloud script it changed the virtual machine name to demo and so it does it all automatically and it's just so easy we can all just reboot it and go from there the backups are insanely easy to recover and restore and there's just a lot of great features in here we can move the disks of demo from one storage device to another so right here right now it is stored on fs02 no sync but we can migrate it while the thing is running anywhere we need to it is just very easy to do all these things and it makes managing it so easy I like this so much better than a lot of the other virtual machine interfaces that they have especially ones that are capable of managing this many virtual machines it is just incredibly easy to do built-in snapshots are awesome and you can have snapshots with ram which is great and so that way even if you've got a ram sensitive thing like a database if you need to take a backup you can do it with memory it's going to take a second longer but you know that if you need to restore from that you're going to be able to restore instantaneously which is awesome all right well that's going to be it for this like really quick introduction to xcpng and Zen Orchestra it is a phenomenal tool it's open source and I use it all the time and so I would highly recommend it I'm going to be doing some future videos on it and it is just a great thing to have go and leave any other questions you got for me over at forums.spaceworks.com and have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 9,306

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Id: euR29S6RHLA

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023