XCP-NG / Xen Orchestra VS Vmware and Why We Choose It For Our Clients

Tamir from Warren systems and we're going to talk about hypervisors specifically xcp ng as it compares to some other options now if you're interesting hiring a separate alarm systems comm if you're interested in furthering discussion on some topics head over to forums that Lauren systems comm where I pretty much deal iam in there in the forums replying in having fun talks about tech topics now XC PNG has been around not as long as some of the other hypervisors but its core has and that is the Zen server in the background so it is based on the Xen hypervisor and then so with Citrix Citrix well still is based on Xen hypervisor and much of Amazon still is based on design hypervisor now this open source project like said been around a while and Citrix took it and put their spin on it so they created the Citrix XenServer then Citrix made a decision to change the license fees pretty much substantially based on what they called an update so you updated the system and suddenly you lost features and are like yeah the features you used to have in that last version are missing now in a new version unless you have license fees now I have an entire detailed history and I won't go into it right now but I'll leave a link to the video I did where it breaks down the history of XenServer and XC PNG and how they came to be started as a Kickstarter campaign and they decided to make the entire system open source and companies are really embracing open source I would say it's not like I would say any one particular year is the year that open source took over it has been a slow methodical growth and a lot of is because of companies misbehaving with licensing fees and people realizing that the critical infrastructure of their business is held ransom so to speak by arbitrary changes in the company going if we charge more money we'll make more money that seems like a good strategy so let's just charge more with by the way we're also going to remove some features and we're not gonna listen to as the customer and your infrastructure is based on this so you don't have any choice to pay spin it around you look at a lot of the open source models where you get all the software for free but then you're going but how is someone gonna support this software well that's the open source model that to me works really really well and if you don't believe me look at Red Hat they were just acquired not that long ago by IBM in 30 plus billion dollar acquisition and for a company that gives away software let's don't think about they just sell support and that's how XC P&G works so let's talk about what it is and what it's not what it's not is a partially open source solution it is a fully 100% free cost you nothing in licenses solution and I think that's really important that way when you're setting these up you don't have any worries about that you're going okay I can just get the software but of course that other big dirty word is do we get support is this you know if I get it what happens if there's a problem what will I do well between the forums and everything if you're a home user it's amazing the level of support that's offered for free but I will cover this right up front that they sell two different things they have a whole support agreement here for their tickets and everything else which look I didn't even have to call it anyone I have the price post it right here as of January of 2020 that it's $600 per host per year which gives you six support tickets ssh pro support one business response time or $1200 per host per year for unlimited support tickets ssh pro support one hour response time on critical issues initial setup assistance etc and this is one of the things I like about them right away now I have this pulled up as well this is the coordination tool Zen orchestra that allows you to orchestrate with xcp ng I look at them as one in the same they are the same developers that run both sides of the this they sell the X CPE and G or I say net sell sell support for it but give away the code and do all the development and they also have all the open source for these and orchestra and that is the orchestrating tool by which you can manage it I'm going to show a little bit of this real quick in a second here but this is really turnkey and this is an important piece of it so you have the hardware you have the XenServer then you have the management platform xoa you can manage then server one of two ways well 103 actually you can do completely do it from the command line and script it you can use a windows-based management tool that's free to download that they have or you can use an orchestra which is an entire web interface now some people don't like the fact that XenServer itself like the XE PNG tool doesn't have a web interface itself at all but I'm actually fine with this and the reason why is because this allows you kind of a one-to-many relationship so zen orchestra can connect to many many zen servers and then you can coordinate separate pools of zen servers and manage them all through one web interface that lets you consolidate them and we have clients that are doing this we have clients with data centers and they manage each stack each group of hosts in zen orchestra and then they have several groups of hosts which are referred to as pools in the Zen system so ones in Orchestra can manage many many pools with one install in one instance and it can do this over the web interface even has the ability to do this across a VPN if need be there's all kinds of different use cases you can use for it I won't dive too much into it I have plenty of videos on how that works but the other thing that's really nice administration and management backup and disaster recovery and cloud enabler now the back of disaster recovery is an important thing because a lot of people say well how do you backup XenServer what do you buy this third party utility and a lot of companies that make hypervisors they have relied not only on selling you a hypervisor but then rely on another third party company to sell you a backup solution they have a full backup disaster recovery solution it allows you to back these machines up backup them to standard open virtualization formats actually you can export these in and out you can save them to external drives you can then figure out how to drop them over on whatever cloud external provider you want without a problem at all this is a really nice feature when you look at it compared to some of the other systems because this gives you turnkey between running Xen orchestra and the xcp and G pro now you're probably thinking is an orchestra cost money but like I said there is a fee if you want the full system should we go resent Orchestra core pricing free you can play with the free version starter $77 a month Enterprise 220 a month and you get the full you know auto patching rolling snapshots full backups backup reports remote assistance all this if you want the paid support if you're a home user you can try the free one or you can even grab all the source codes they have an entire guide on this that lets you grab the source code and compile it yourself and you completely will be able to do all the features they don't hide anything it's all there if you compile from a source I have a few videos on that so that encourages home use do this so once again you're not locked into a license fee these are support fees and that makes it you know a really good choice this is one of the reasons I like XenServer so much now let's go back over here and talk about some comparisons here so let's scroll down and you know X C P and G versus sensor were free and xep XO versus vmware this is a couple of the comparisons going to be one why would you use this or citrix well the license fees the citrix are ridiculous and confusing and I'm not sure why Citrix does some of the things they do but that's that's fine good news is if you are a Citrix user you can install this right over the top and import all your stuff without a problem at all there's a 100% compatibility because they're all running in XenServer and we've done this for a few well more and more clients all the time we've installed over the top of a Citrix install and everything brought right over into XC PNG I still recommend backing out first because things can go wrong but it does work so here's all the features and I'm not gonna read through every little piece but a couple of people asked me in commercial feature wise it does have SR io v networking and it does support GPU pass-through with high-end graphics cards like some of your high on Tesla ones and things like that if you're a person want to build your home lab and you want to talk about GPU past you probably are talking about more of a consumer-grade system you can do that from the command line it's not exactly exposed in the full system so it does exist it is a possibility to do it but it's not exposed to the web interface in there so let's also talk about directly with vmware in a nice little chart day if you're not leave links to all this this is all the stuff images and assets post on our website so when you look at the two together and like I said I combine these into one but they do separate out because it's delegating where the functions are web Council for being a management basic VM a admin live via migration live VDI migration high availability I've even done videos on each one of these topics of we even moved a phone server with active phone calls on to show the V live VDI migration between servers is you know as smooth as it is on other platforms and I can not drop a phone call when I do it so I have videos on each of these topics you do have a council view hyper-converged solution now I touched on this briefly I'm not going to dive into it in this particular but they have EXO San and V San are the two different type of converged solutions for some of the storage so that doesn't just in there a little bit more enterprise-level but it does go to that scale of enterprise level tool updates automatic updates this is kind of cool when you have the full zen orchestra you don't wait if you compile it yourself you're not update yourself but if you pay for it that's one of you things you get is the full service in terms of they do all the updating for you that's what you're paying for is that automation level thin provisioning is supported on both platforms health checks roll base administration ACL single sign-on self-service scheduled tasks you can schedule the moving starting stopping of VMs there's a lot a matter of fact because this is all written it's all Linux on the back end with a really nice web or face center front end you can do things from the command line and integrate them into cron jobs or you can create in the interface an entire schedule to do things including not just untie of the ability but load-balancing when a server becomes under too much load you can then tell it under those circumstances move those VMs to a server that has less load that's completely supported in the all free version by the way here does none of these are paid things you get basic backup now the backups are really extensive in here this is one of the things I like so yes you can do a basic backup but if you want to do Delta backups that's completely a possibility file level restores is actually a pretty cool feature where you have it configured properly you can not just grab that old VM you can pull a file out of one of the old VMs without having to a full VM restore it'll let you do that continuous replication and of course the load balancing like I had mentioned so file restore and Delta backups are great because if you're going well I wanted to snapshot my VM but there's only so many you know megabytes available for me to upload this and how do we do that if you're saying it's an integrated backup solution Delta backups you're only synchronizing the changes so once you do that initial VM uploading and you backup the directory where the deltas are created no problem it's a very small matter of fact they're so small and so fast we use Delta backups to hourly backup all of our machines here at the office and all the virtual stacks we run and we set this up for clients as well it's a really nice solution to you can keep a lot of iterations without going through and having an entire you know separate backups and separate tools and separate licensing et cetera it's all done through one single pane of glass now the last thing I'll cover a little bit is I'm going to talk about the webinar if sign here and I'm going to open up both versions just to show you they're the same the one I compiled from open source and the one that we have for that is the paid premium so right here is the open paid premium sorry paid premium one it's completely up to date I can go over here I can set up jobs backups all the features blah blah blah everything's in here I can import a VM import a disk create new storage etc we go over here well in fact well something a few people have asked me for and it even has the whole hub they've got templates in here and things like that to start even loading you want to load pfSense in here click install it'll grab and download and install it Debian Tencent OS they've got a lot of cool integration plus you can import you know standard formats you come over here to the compiled one that is 100% open source here's all the features and here's all done working the only thing that's missing right now I never compiled the hub features in because you do have to pull some of those in but I still have the new VM storage I can still import VMs I can go over here to the backups you can see stuff working you can see the Delta backups that I can do this one failed for reason it's got a whole notification system in here for one failed this is something I did when I was moving a server it's all in here and works perfectly fine and I do this to show that without any license fees all this will completely work and but because I like to paid support we encourage our clients that we set these up for they frequently want to buy support packages we do encourage them to buy especially when you talk about a host support package at like $600 a year that is so inexpensive compared to the cost of a lot of other hypervisors the last little thing I'll cover here right here is a lab server and we even have one of our other demo servers when we set them up you can just go in here inside of XC PNG connect to the lab server and now we're we go over here to the hosts and now I've connected more hosts so this is that idea of from one control plane I can manage many hosts so these two servers are in a host I called the puddle because it's a pool and there's only two of them that's my silliness anyways for those asking why I call it that and this is air lab server we do more of our testing and once again this is just a standalone server that I can quickly attach and spin up here and then I can now from one control plane control all the VMS and without them being in the same pool I can even migrate VMs between any connected hosts and when you see the other hosts in here for example these initials represent a client server we set up on our network before was deployed we did all the migration form and did all the testing when we built their server I did a review on that particular box it's a dell server we loaded XE PE and g on we just attach them really quickly here do all the testing set up maybe move certain servers and build them on there as needed and then we deliver them to the clients this is the nice thing about this and then if I connected over a VPN I can actually reconnect and orchestrate from here but generally our process is to install the XE PNG and Zen server directly on their machine so they have their own control plane and they have a ternal IT department that's going to be managing it so they wanted control plane done internally but the possibilities are there so it's kind of an overview of like why we use it the power of it it's a fully like I said open source which means you are not beholden if they decide to they're not going to change something on you like Citrix said well yeah your license that we use to give you what Citrix had a free license they change the terms and conditions on you and removed features because they said well that's what it says in our license we can do that this is all done under full GPL all these features if you wanted to compile yourself because you want nothing to do with that company it does not need to activate it does not need to talk to an external server and we're even running into some consulting work we've done with companies that do type of military work and one of the things that that was really interesting is they just don't like the fact that so many things call out to licensing servers all the time that's kind of a you know something that bothers them a little bit too going you know our infrastructure is very dependent on these third-party companies your license and those activations constantly call out it kind of makes us feel like we just don't own it all the time and in some ways they're kind of right they don't because if they don't renew the license on certain servers they will expire and when you talk about something like ESXi it's not a bad platform it's been around for a while it's a very mature of well develop product has massive market saturation but if they charge dearly for it and I you know I've had some people love it some people hate it some people have hated the problems they've had with it and tit for tat feature wise XE PNG is not only ready for the enterprise it has been deployed in enterprise we have done consulting with so many companies that I cannot there's not a way for me to publicly clothes names but I have seen very large companies that are all using XC PNG for their systems frequently almost every time we see is because they are already familiar with the sin Citrix XenServer market and they wanted to switch over to XC PNG because the same thing they were angry at the license fees they said the report support was poor the licensees were high and that's a bad combination for things especially when Citrix raise the fees and remove features and want an even more fees for features they had used to having it actually caused them not want to patch an upgrade the folks over at XC PNG you can hit their forums up you can see that they're very actively developed and they've listened to the crowd there's been features finally added that people said wow I asked Citrix for this years ago they never did it XC B and G is built in many many more features and you know keep up with their blog you'll see they're adding a lot more things all the time including a lot of private networking and systems including the way to take servers that are maybe remote to each other and create GRE encrypted tunnels between them so you can have shared private networks Rakim there's a whole nother project they're doing to expand that capability for building out your infrastructure which once they once I gets a time to do that I'm gonna do some videos on that topic as well so they've taken it and gone further than a lot of other things too and it's all integrated these aren't third-party plugins these are all integrations they have which back to the original thing I said they're all open-source some license free so here home users are looking to start out on this I have a lot of getting started videos on this I'm going to do some new ones because they're at the version 8 my last ones are based on seven but they've only added features everything I said in my version 7 in getting started video is so relevant so this is the reason why for people always ask why I use XC P&G why I like it we've built a lot of our stuff on there yes I've looked at some of the other ones the runner-up for this is probably going to be someone's gonna ask would be proxmox I think it's a good solid system I don't feel I've seen any proxmark systems that scale this way but Proxima is still a great option I don't have anything that I would tell people not to use it we have clients that have it in their back-end I'm not the most familiar with it but they seem to really like it it's a solid platform as well so I'm not going to downplay the fact is but my choice is and for the consulting work we've done and the integrations we've done for some and seen some large systems where we've helped migrate you know p2v migrations we just said another one so we physically moved all the servers on there XC PNG has been my go-to it's been a really solid performer and having everything from backups turnkey all built in to one system with one easy control plane makes my life really simple and that's why on reasons we like it alright thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to Lauren systems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with in what projects you like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion how to row to forum style Lauren systems comm where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel out another way is head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 44,337

Rating: 4.9620361 out of 5

Keywords: xcp-ng vs, xcp-ng vs proxmox, xcp-ng vs esxi, xcp-ng vs xenserver, xcp-ng vs vmware, xcp-ng vs hyper-v, xcp-ng vs vsphere, xen server, xcp-ng, xen orchestra, virtualization, xenserver

Id: wrLue-ENMJc

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020