XCP NG VS Proxmox 2022 And Why I Chose...

tom here from orange systems and since i did my recent video on xcpng talking about vmware it's because it's june of 2022 and we are still figuring out everything is going to happen with vmware based on its purchase by broadcom i'll leave a link to that video down below but the most common question and a good one at that is what about proxmox when i posted this on linkedin when i had this video on youtube i just see all the comments on there and i wanted to clarify a couple things one i have nothing against proxmox there is this weird assumption a lot of people seem to have that if you like one tool you must hate the other tool or there's some terrible reason you're not using it i'll admit that proxmox and xcpng are both open source are both good they are both solid platforms to build your virtualization on that being said why did i choose xe png i'm going to put the details together for that now this is not a me trying to convince you if your use case and the feature sets that i'm going to cover here just don't line up then keep using proxmox if that's what you're happy with that's one thing about tech is especially in the open source world you may get multiple answers of how to achieve something and they're both correct there is just differences in the nuances the way these things are implemented that one may work for you or another so i wanted to get that out of the way at the beginning of the video that way if you are hoping that i'm going to be a deciding factor maybe i'm just here to drop some knowledge but i'm not here to tell you which one to use that's never my goal i only like to share information let people know what's available out there and let them make the decision hopefully a more informed one before we get started in the details of this video let's first are you an individual or company looking for support on a network engineering storage or virtualization project is your company or internal id team looking for someone to proactively monitor your system security or offer strategic guidance to keep your it systems operating smoothly not only would we love to help consult on your project we also offer fully managed or co-managed i.t service plans for businesses in need of it administration or it teams in need of additional support with our expert install team we can also assist you with all of your structured cabling and wi-fi planning projects if any of this piques your interest fill out our hire us form at laurentsystems.com so we can start crafting a solution that works for you if you're not interested in hiring us but you're looking for other ways you want to support this channel there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel and now back to our content now the first piece i want to start with right here is my forums and everything i'll be talking about will be linked down below including a series of videos i have on getting started with xd png and also a series of videos on getting started with proxmox done by jay from learn linux tv so it's version 7 that's current as of june of 2022 for proxmox and the latest version of xcpng is version eight depending on when you're watching this i may have the version eight videos done but there's not much difference between seven and eight now the other thing you have to note zen orchestra is separate from xcp and g but i treat them as the same because they're supported by the same place and it's one of those things that i just want to get out of the way is how zen orchestra integrates into xcp and g because this is a really important thing the zen orchestra is the web orchestration tool that allows for the management and i treat them as one and the same but i know they are absolutely separate this web orchestration tool has a one-to-many relationship with many many hosts that you can have with xcpng and resource pools you can build and one instance is an orchestra to manage them all even if they're remote even if they're remote in another data center there's a lot of options on there they even have some advanced proxying options to have proxy workers that manage at a local site while you manage through your main site the zen orchestra interface this is where there's a big difference between the way they're implemented because proxmox for each host is a complete with web management and everything installed for every host and you group the hosts into their clusters with zen orchestra you use an orchestra to take the hosts and group them into clusters but the hosts themselves are very lightweight and don't really have any web interface on them exo-lite is something you're working on in the future to give some basic management but your main tool is the zen orchestra tool how that tool is sold and delivered you can get a free version that has some limited functionality they have a service delivery model which is keep you with the latest version with the limited knowledge support based on your subscription that you can buy for it or you can download the source code people in the home lab that have done this are very well aware of how this works you download source code you compile it yes i have a video on how to do that and you get all the features built in to the open source one and you get a little note on there that says no support just like how proxbox when you use the free version it says that you don't have their paid support for the professional support so pretty simple they have a similar model but you do have to compile it yourself so i will admit right off the beginning here that zen orchestra being separate does make it a little bit more challenging to get started with xcpng especially because it runs as a vm now for those of you saying it's not lightweight this is where there's also a little bit of nuance to it because the single zen orchestra instance being able to manage so many hosts you're not repeating the same web interface on all the hosts you're using one single vm instance to manage all the different zen installs that you have so if you have 100 200 xcp and g hosts each one because the limitation of 64 per pool you've grouped them all into pools you can manage all those pools and all those hosts through ones and orchestra interface that you loaded once now base operating system centos but highly customized it's not just centos and you're getting support from centos which obviously with the changes that have occurred could be a problem they are taking care of the support and all the updates and things that go within it versus proxmox is based on debian high availability yes high availability support in both of these max supported hosts per cluster 64 was an orchestra for each pool that you group them into but with proxmox it's a little bit less clear because it depends on the hardware as best i can understand from reading into forums in our documentation there's a reference center documentation that says they have seen high-end production systems with more than 50. i don't really have a number for you outside of what i read through their documentation if you read through the forums a lot of people seem to think it should stop at around 32 before you run into problems it has something to do with the way the synchronization works between the hosts container management this may be a hard stop for some people it is not natively supported inside of zen orchestra or xcpng but they do have lxc container management within proxmox web console via an orchestra as i had mentioned and it's native to the system there live vma creation between hosts yes you can just do live vm migration between the different hosts and you have to have them within the same cluster in proxmox probably not a big deal for some people but you can actually do it to the other as i mentioned different resource pools you can migrate back and forth between with different ones even if they're not in the same resource pool live disk migration yes and yes local storage gdocumentation and shared storage see documentation there's a lot of storage support and there's a lot of details and they both implement things a little bit different the first thing i will give a clear example of is zfs yes zfs supported in xcpng but no when you do a snapshot in xcpng it's still a virtual machine snapshot not a cfs snapshot versus if you build on cfs you're able to do zfs snapshots within proxmox because it talks natively to zfs so there's differences there when it comes to shared storage yeah there's a lot of different support in at first glance you may go but it looks like there might be a couple extra things that are supported on xcpng versus proxmox but the reality is it's debian you could probably load the support for the other things on there see documentation think about your use case then provisioning depends on storage type for both of these but yes it's supported mac supported vm disk size of two terabytes more than two terabytes depends on the back end it is my opinion that attaching extremely large discs to virtual machines is not a wonderful idea i generally prefer and will use windows as an example if you build a windows machine but you have eight terabytes of data you'd like to have shared across windows presenting an iscsi extent inside of windows would be a better way to handle it alternatively using an ass attaching an 8 terabyte vm when you want to back up the vms um that's a a good idea in my opinion go ahead and hate me in the comments down below and tell me you liked attaching 16 terabytes at a time or eight terabytes at a time to any particular vm but i have generally found that to be a little bit harder to manage and not the best way to implement it usually you want it to be small lightweight so you can back up your operating system very easily snapshot it easily migrated between hosts if or shared storage locations without having to wait for 16 terabytes to move just my thoughts but hey leave yours down below hyper converge setup exosan versus ceph and cfs options they have so they have a couple different ways you can do hyper conversion proxmox i'm not going to get into the details of it but exosan and x07v2 is coming update management and automation yes via the zen orchestra or via the package manager yes via the web interface or be the package manager um it goes a little bit more extensive in zen because you got to roll your pool updates you don't want any one pool having to be reset with too many resources on it they actually have some really neat features when it comes to updating to automate all of that of restarting all the servers and migrating things between clusters if it's h a so there's actually a little bit more nuance to that if you want to dive into the details of it so check the documentation or you know watch some of the videos i have on some of those topics an accredited console yes advanced networking this is a c documentation so vxlan sdn firewall where you can create specialized network adapters on there no these platforms have not implemented the same way but they do have these extended features that you can do such as vxlan or that private network adapter that you want across different uh hosts there's ways to do that in both of these but go to the documentation to see about the details of how they're implemented including the firewall options that are available or ip restricting options that are available for both of them cloud init cloud init does work in both of these now the backups is the last thing i'm going to mention but we're going to go into the demo here in a minute to show you the web interfaces between them and that's where there's going to be a significant difference but the backup specifically is really basic in just proxmox they have their separate proxmox backup appliance which has more backups jay from learnlinkstv has a video on that as well be linked down below but yes the backup is fully integrated into zen orchestra and gives you quite a large array of scheduling and features and including one feature that's really cool that i just did a video on which is auto restore testing to validate your backups on an automated schedule where it actually goes through and fully restores the vm verifies that the vm boots shuts the vm down and destroys it uh it can do that on an automated or one off basis because you want to check a restore and not just check it and go through a manual process but actually automate that process and that's a really cool feature that's integrated in there now as i said in the beginning i'm not a big proxmox user but i've gone through the setup and i did not find it particularly difficult to set up to get working to attach an iscsi to to load a vm in and i went through it and this is what it looks like now i'm not going to spend too much time on the interface but it's got the basics it's got the things you need and it works that's the bottom line it wasn't hard it's relatively easy to go through set these settings in here see what's going on here's your cloud init settings options boot order but we'll admit is it's a little rigid when it comes to things like how you might want to name something or manage something it is compared to the way zen orchestra which i will cover more in depth a little bit later here in a video where that is the killer feature is how you manage things at scale in zen orchestra but it's very manageable in here you just don't have quite as many features like here's some of the backups i can say backup now create a snapshot suspend it how do you want to do all the modes everything's here and the ui is not difficult by any measure but one thing i did find a little bit interesting when i was going through this is when i went through the storage and if i look at the local storage well not there let's go back to the data center view and it's this right here where i can see how much is available here but when i click on like the synology iscsi one it doesn't seem to show anything in here but that's actually where my vm is running so i'm not a hundred percent sure what i did wrong for that not to show up i also had a weird issue and it would connect but not give me an error but it wouldn't work the vm would fail so those were a couple things but could completely be me and completely be a problem i had uh because it was a problem on the synology side where i had a permission wrong for the iscsi when i set it up and i wasn't able to find it here until i connected it to zen orchestra which told me it had a permission here and i fixed the permission error and went back over here in proxmox and then it connected again but didn't once again didn't give me an error but actually let me build the vm on it so there's been a couple little nuances i found like that a little strange but completely could be me i'm not ruling that out but overall i didn't find this to be a challenging or difficult interface at all to use to get things done the monitoring looks decent on here but other things like where it goes back and forth between the command line sometimes a little bit confusing for me but that's just me being new to proxbox for those of you that use it a lot like jay has well it's going to be a lot easier now xcpng on the other hand i find the interface more intuitive like i said this is still all opinion as far as that goes but hey people want to know what the interface looks like now this is our two pools four hosts and 55 virtual machines this is where you'll start to notice the big differences between these different platforms if we go over here to home and we see that it's filtered for tom you can create all these cool filtered views to filter and tag different vms you can see the tags this way so these are tags for tom or tags for tom test machines so we can click on any of these tags and filter and pivot between them or eric one of my other staff he's got some machines here so now i can filter to all of the things that eric is working on he's working on restoring and testing a few different backup systems so this is how we do that while you're doing it you can see and we'll go into like eric's wind 10 system i can go over here to the console if i needed to see what's going on there i can go to the network here i can click on the different ips that it has apparently it's got a few different interfaces if i click on them it just copies the ips to the clipboard i can even we'll go back to one of my vms i don't mess with eric let's go to this right here tom's lab we're going to go and start this vm so it has a console that comes up you can see the stats on it everything's nice to me and laid out tab wise like this now back to these tags if we add a tag like this we're going to add youtube as a tag we can go back over here to home put youtube in and these are things i tagged with youtube which does include running a nested version of proxmox for a youtube video how does nested virtualization work yeah just a button right here how about loading the tools and this is a really important one i've covered before if you would like the windows update to automatically load the tools when you load windows vm so you have the different access to the network information with windows well you just check this little box right here you have to do it with the vm's off it's going to give you an error but other than stopping the vm you just hit that and away you go present from accidental deletion or accidental shutdown or auto power on are all just little toggles right here that you can do so pretty simple in terms of changing anything on here i do everything from the zen orchestra i don't use any other tools to manage any of my zen servers it's really all done through these interfaces right here and some of them you can even drag if you want to change boot orders turn devices on and off and hit save for stop force restart back over to are things that say youtube like this right here swapping networks so currently this has got 172 1669 we just booted it but what if we want to move it and we have a bunch of different network adapters in here because we simulate things we have all these different resources in here but let's move it to i think we call it the pwnage pool so it's another vlan that we have it'll take a second it's going to refresh and then it will have a new ip address all this happens without refreshing the page or restarting the vm all the interface updates in real time and kind of an easy example i'm going to give of that so i'm going to look over to my right and type in test and you can see in real time i'm updating somewhere else this is actually really handy for when me and my staff and all of us are working on different things we can actually keep seeing each other's renaming and changing of things dynamically the interface is constantly being updated now back to the tagging feature and why that makes a lot of sense too for things like storage we're always testing things we're a lab environment a lot that's how i make some my youtube videos or we're standing up things for clients we can type in lab and i'm going to expand it out here these are all the different lab resources for storage right now lab trinity pool you can see i got tags in some of these or some of them are attached to the different lab servers that are in here this is what gives you a lot of power when it comes to doing things and it's not just for finding them or viewing them it also gets related to things like backups so if we go back over to vms and let's look at our production vms and let's click on one of them and it is easy cleaning up the interface we'll just reduce it back down go here i have two tags on this one's critical one's production so if we click on critical these are all the things i refer to as critical so we're going to go back over to here we're going to look at our backups here's the backup jobs attached to this particular vm because i said back up things that are critical with this thing right here it says fullback of all critical systems so if we go over here drop the critical tag go to the backups it's gone if we go back over here to the general tab we have critical back to it and it's back the way that works is really simple so you go here to your backups which we can actually go here overview we'll type in critical for the backup we're going to click edit and we see we're backing up things with this tag you can add vm tags to include or exclude or even do scheduling there's a lot of things they're all based on vm tags this allows you to add things to production without having to go back in and change any of your backup you just have a tag that you know like critical that you want for a certain backup job as it runs and you'll just add that tag this allows just a wild amount of flexibility when it comes to moving resources around when it comes to having all the backups now while on the topic of backups there's also the remotes and what the remotes are is all the different storage destinations for backups this is all handled by zen orchestra so even though we have we go back over to our pools we have our lab pool and our pool is them which is more like our production pool the backup system is able to do backups simultaneously to different pools or to different storage targets as i see fit this is actually really nice from a flexibility standpoint that even though i can have production and non-production environments managed in one single interface the backups i can set the resource pools so we go back over here and actually look at what those look like we go here to remotes off-site production backups production backups and the lab backups i have three separate storage destinations for them that way on my back end i have different backup strategies because i don't bother backing up all the stuff that is inside of here for the lab backups but obviously the off-site ones those get a synchronized offsite so i don't want the constant rolling backups that occur here to production backups so this is still production backup but this diversity is what is really cool about it because you can choose whatever you want to be your storage target i'm using just standard smb protocol tied to a true nas as my destination and then for my sheer nas i send it off but nonetheless it's the interface flexibility that i like so much for example we'll look at this proxbox demo and we can just do this call it whatever we want it actually lets us put a pretty long name in here with whatever we need and i can also do this but i won't i could type all i want there so i can give some really solid descriptions of what these are and when you have as i showed here if we go back over to the overview and you have 55 vms and there's going to be a lot more soon with the project we're doing you kind of need to start grouping and tagging things together to make that just easier to manage now one more thing i'm going to note is how you handle logging users because we are a multi-user environment so i have the email addresses blurred out but we can go through and figure out who did what when and it has an entire nice log that has immutable integrity to make sure that this has been not tampered with this is just really an important feature when you're going through and someone did something who did what when that's an important aspect and of course is completely searchable including finding out when tom added the tag youtube to a couple different things that can be found just like that or we can go back to critical and you can see tag remove tag ad and tom did that there so there's a lot of logging that goes on inside of here speaking of user management i will mention because someone may ask i didn't really cover it in detail when i was comparing the two because there's a little bit more nuance to that as well but when you go into the plugins there is off github off google off ldap off saml so there's multiple ways you can authenticate and federate against other services if you need to there's also a netbox plugin if you're not familiar with netbox look it up for ip management performance alerting their software defined networking controller the transport email nagios slack notifications usage report and some web hooking options to get you know a little bit more advanced if you need to now as i said at the beginning i favor xcpng but i don't see any problems with proxmox especially if there's some feature like lxc container management that you prefer then stay with it there's not a reason i can tell you like oh no get off proxxbox it's bad it's unstable because that's not true it is a good platform it is a stable platform doesn't mean my preference isn't for xc png and i especially love the zen orchestra interface and how it handles things at scale like managing lots and lots of vms and we've worked with some clients and that's sometimes what we're demoing stuff is putting together a project in-house that we are proof of concepting for a larger client that may need it and that being said you kind of need that manageability if you have like you know 800 900 vms that you have to shuffle around based on criteria or change backup rules on um and not having to modify 800 backup jobs and or when you move them in and out adding a tag so they go or belong to certain backup jobs makes that job just a lot easier when you're doing things at scale so i guess that's maybe one takeaway from this depends on if you're a smaller or larger environment smaller environments if you just need the more basic features of proxmox great if you go man i really need those features because we're trying to figure out how to handle 800 vms in a reasonable way and that seems to be easier to do in my opinion inside of xcpng let me know your comments down below head over to forums for a more in-depth discussion thanks and thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video if you've enjoyed the content please give us a thumbs up if you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon if you'd like to hire a short project head over to lawrences.com and click the hires button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thanks again for watching and look forward to hearing from you you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 76,137

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, proxmox vs xcp-ng, proxmox vs xcp-ng 2022, proxmox vs xcp-ng performance, proxmox vs xen orchestra, proxmox vs, xcp-ng xen orchestra, xen server, home lab, xenserver vs proxmox

Id: xB22GKGJkHY

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2022