Xen Orchestra 5.92 - Backup retry, refreshed XO Appliance, new REST API endpoints and more...

welcome from this new release of Zen Orchestra 5.92 for the February months I we're really happy to uh you know announce all the features we have but now uh as we are doing almost like a tradition we'll start with the project and Community stuff related to zenak isra cpng and the entire VES community so um let's quickly talk about popularity and that's uh you know cool to say that uh we are more popular than ever um we got a kind of you know good traction or momentum uh you know due to the um broadcom VMware acquisition Exodus or name it the way you want but still we have impressive numbers of you know people going to the Forum registering asking for demos and so on and so on so that's great and we welcome all those new person in our great Community uh if you want you know to interact with us uh feel free to post on the Forum or to contact us on the vetes websites vet.on feel free I we be happy to answer all your question and remember what we do here is not just you know uh being there when you need when you have a problem but ALS Soo when you when you need to plan your migration or deploying a new you know infrastructure and so on so let us know moving on on what's going on around us and who is talking about us like new section called articles podcast and videos um we have many uh let's say big software vendors or Community podcast and so on talking about us and how to migrate so that's that's really cool so I will let you you know explore those links if you want to have some ideas on the existing Alternatives because we are not the only ones obviously and as I we always said we're happy to have other open source Alternatives so feel free to take a look and uh you know learn what's going on and you know what's happening with this entire migration from VMware to other Alternatives there's also to um let you know some interesting videos made by Tom from Lauren system about how to start with Vates VMS which is xpg plus Z Orchestra how to deal with networking and how to deal with Windows VMS and vtpm feel free to take a look we also got a two guys Tech video about xpg versus esxi which is pretty interesting and finally um if you are a redditor if you you know uh like to be on Reddit uh just notice we already have a subredit since a while but now it tends to be more and more active in the last months again it's not a surprise due to the VMR thing but still um there's the place where there's more and more people obviously the Forum still still stays as the main uh entry point but you know uh it's fine also to uh to have your own community in the place you know very well next thing is we are improving um let's say our openness in a general sense we started to announce it last month but as some you know uh let's say our cousin like Zen server is closing more and more what they're doing we are exactly doing the opposite um so we try to improve our documentation and how to contribute to Zan Orchestra and for xpg it's already done but we wanted to be sure that it's you know really easy to do so so we added a contributing.md file in the root folder of the GitHub repo so you have all the thing you need to learn how to help us could be again code but documentation or you know report and so on contributing is pretty wide and even spreading the word about us is something really important so uh feel free to to do so always happy to have you know new member of the community and ambassadors talking about our solution and in the same Spirits I would say um our design system is now public so um I I ined that last month that we were preparing this but now it's done and the entire figat design system is now publicly accessible so you will take a look on kind of a sneak peek on the components that will be used in excelite and so six the next major revamp of the UI and you will also discover the mount work required to get there because um this is just you know the design system showing how each component has to be that's the mockup the template if you like so there is a menu you can open and you could see um we have all the buttons fonts inputs loaders scrollbars cards whatever so it's pretty huge um but you could take a look and it's all open and if you have feedback there's a block um sorry a thread on our Forum that uh is there to discuss some question you might have about it so yeah it's another step being even more open than before our next topic is using Packer with X xpg if you wonder how to do so if you want to build templates in a fully automated fashion with a you know something you can repeat without fearing breaking anything you should read that article it's uh it was contributed by a member of our community so also if you want to write uh you know cool blog post about how you do this and that please contact us we'll be happy to put you in the spotlight but anyway back to Packer um this is really interesting because it could be used obviously combined with terraform if you want to you know terraform use those fresh created automated templates or if you just want to get all the time up toate templates so that's a great uh how to feel free to take a look and read and try yourself uh this is a really useful tool for autom make still on xpg we have the 8.3 bet 2 that is out so there's dedicated blog post about it I W go to all the details but it's another milestone for um a the next release we'll have that will be stable in a matter of months now so soon I would say uh but still beta 2 is here with many improvements so feel free to visit the link and explore what's going on what's next also New Zen version so it's pretty exciting so uh take a look and on the community and ecosystem the last point is we will be at the cloudfest 2024 so it's a European events in Germany and it's a pretty big one and basically it's everyone you know hosting providers msps uh or even companies who want to you know check what's going on uh in the uh Hardware World software World related to sever visualization or not markets uh will be there so if you want to meet us I will be personally there also we'll have some people from the technical team too so if you are around uh feel free to uh to say hi and if you want a ticket by the way because you can reach the event just contact us to vat. cont we can maybe uh you know find a way to give you a free ticket if you're interested so let me know and for uh non-european friends uh be aware that we might go more uh for example in the US uh next year for more US events and so on so hang on we come to you uh and we'll probably you know decide pretty soon which event we'll do next year in the US and let's switch to the uh content of this new release of Zan Orchestra so sorry for the long intro but you know there's many things to tell um let's focus now on the features so uh starting with backup as we usually do since I think years now backup is the first topic that we are covering in our release and now we announcing the backup R try um it might sound trivial but it wasn't so basically now when you create a backup job you can set the number of ret tries if one backup is failing by the way the way it works is it will do all the VM backups even those failing it won't we try just now it will wait for all the backup job to be done and then it will retry the failed ones after in the end um obviously don't try to put a too big number of a try two three four it seems to be a sweet spot um this will allow you to avoid transient failure in your Network slash whatever happening in your VM so it's pretty convenient works pretty well um so feel free to test it it's available obviously in the latest channel for now and will be in stable next month um we also improved on the backup side of things the vhd loop detection so um we had some reports on minor issues with using mirror backup so we uh improve that and we refactor the code and it's faster and better now since we did that so um if you use mirror backup which is great by the way if you not aware about it it's the capability to backup a backup repository by itself but with for example different schedule retention and so on so you could I don't know have a local backup in your data center but have a S3 backup on a I don't know whatever storage provider with encryption and so on and maybe keep it for I don't know six months one year and so on so that's really cool to use so feel free to do so now it's even better we are also releasing today a new xoa so that's Xeno tral Appliance um the old one was built three years ago so it was time to refresh it uh because it was bundling 5.60 version of Zeno kistra so uh you know rather rather old uh but now it's it's also on dbn 12 it was on 11 and also internally we built it with backer ourself so uh expect to have more often release of xoa if you want to migrate from an old one to a new one we got a link to cover you it's pretty easy you export the config import on the new and you will run on it the old one will continue to work for years uh but at some point we need to migrate so if you have a question open a ticket and ask us uh no problem feel free to do so moving on on the rest API um so the rest API is now getting more and more traction more and more people are using it so that's fine as a reminder we also have a Json RPC API but it's not that easy to use so we build the new one and we basically ask people to tell us what they need and so we have a dedicated for Section to do so so again if there's some features you require let us know and for those two new features that we released it was asked by the community so as you can see uh this is something we do we listen to our users and we build things they are that are needed the first one is to get the all the users um that um all the groups that the users have and vice versa so it's pretty simple um you request a user you list all the groups that the user is inside and you have a list of references of the name of the group but also the URL of the group so you could make a request on it and the opposite Works uh you can request a group and to list all the users inside it very simple works out of the box uh and very useful if you want to get a report for example for your internal it on you know the users and so on we also added a feature that is displaying if you're using smt or hyperthreading um uh basically some people want to know for the license reason inside their VMS uh if they're using you know actual cores or threats and so on so or for security Reason by the way if you want to know if you disable hyperthreading or or not um so now you could just make a request on host SL host uid smmt and it will return enabled to a for simple works pretty well um also we decided to improve the way it's done right now it's done with a plug-in so we made a contribution directly to the zappy project Upstream to get that information bundled into it so we can get rid of the plugin so as you can see we always want to contribute Upstream to improve the entire platform uh itself not just via Zen Orchestra but xpg and everything inside um about six xite so there's many things to tell most of them are not visible so I won't enter into the detail but in short we continue to integrate all the components into something called Web core web core will be the shared Library between exolite and xo6 so they could use the same component but maybe in a different way with different parameters and so on um so it's a lot of work but it's moving pretty well in fact um there's also collection system to you know deal with a component Behavior Uh for example the treeview multi select tasks subtasks and so on so we made a system to do it so that's also a lot of work that is not visible yet but that will be tremendously helpful when you actually have uh the uh UI released and you start to implement it we also have a new Tre viw component that is made that will be available uh in the next releases that we'll have for excelite and that will be also used in a better version in EXO 6 I mean better because EXO 6 will have to deal with many more things than just a single pool so that's why the component could be extended with more features um we have a new drop- down component that is detail a custom scroll barar um also improved how the color will work in what we call the color context so that's how you build a UI basically so we you know we are fully transparent and explain how we do that so uh feel free to you know uh Explore More in details all the challenge there is and how we are tackling them and building all the blocks needed to get our products now the load balancer uh which is which has been partially uh Rewritten last month now we added a feature to exclude some VM from the load balancer itself VMS or host so it's very convenient if you want to not use the load balancer for some dedicated resources and now the MK section where uh we are talking about many different things so this month we started to work on USB path through through the UI it's not done yet but you can already see the physical USB devices that are connected to your host into the host Advanced View and enabled mean that this device is ready for USB path through and next month we'll have the entire feature in the UI so hang on in the meantime there's the documentation to do it with the CLI but that should be the last time you need to do it through the CLI because we'll have all the UI done next month we also improve the uh Auto on at pool level to be able to enable it so it's a kind of a long story but long story short um even if zenor isra when you enable autop Ron on a VM it will check that is enabled on the pool because if it's not then it won't work but we had the case where people imported Zen Orchestra Appliance VM with aoron but it wasn't triggered on the pool itself so now we got an error message or warning let's say telling you that um yes poron is set on the VM but not on the pool so that W work and now you can enable it on the pool directly so that's a lot better moving on to robots.txt so uh that's a file that you put in any web server to tell the uh crawlers from Google and so on to not um register you to not uh you know fetch the content uh that you have so you won't be indexed on Google and so on so that's important because you don't want Zen Orchestra to be on Google and you know discovered this way uh so by default we got the robots.txt if you want to remove it for whatever weird reason let us know there is a way to disable it in the configuration but it should be left as a default also remember if you expose an orchestra to the internet that's fine that's okay we do that but you need to always enable to factor authentication or open ID connect or Su to be sure that simple password won't be the only thing between you and a hacker so that's important and that's a good reminder uh moving on on the new zappy stat format so we had some trouble with the stats recently on the next on the last release uh we update we made an X cpng .3 it was due to zappy change and a bug two things at once so thanks to the community to the XI team and the xcp team we found the problem we found what to fix so it was fixed into zappy and it's also improve and Zen Orchestra and niite to be to read the new formats of the stat that was a slight change but still that broke the stat so now it's fixed in the latest Channel and it's also fixed in exolite and the bug is fixed in zappi so everything is done and thanks for the entire community and our own teams that was really a cross team effort to to find and fix it not a big problem but requires a lot of synchronization between people so that's cool and it showcased that we could work all together to fix problems let's move on on the last part so there's saring the zenra config backups that could be done in the cloud so in your account directly now they're sorted in the right way from the most recent to the most old one older one uh it sounds you know pretty simple thing to do but you know there's so many things to do that sometimes it becomes a low priority but at some point when you are trigger that much by the fact it's not sorted correctly finally you decide to do it so that's exactly what we did with this feature uh we added new units you know pedabytes terabytes um we also modified the vm. container logic to know where the VM is previously it was only when the VM was running or post that we uh had the container as the host and otherwise it was the the pool when VM was shut down and so on but we improve that if the VM got a dis in a storage a local storage repository to a host we know for sure it can't run anywhere else than on the hosts on the dedicated host where the local Sr is and so this way even if the VM is shut down the container will be the host if it's the case so we improve a bit that logic we also improve the fact that you can now change the MTU of a network but use it carefully because it generates some load and our uh support and Community because sometimes people change the MTU and forget to do that everywhere on the switches and so on it is pretty tricky thing to detect so adjust it if you really need it you know um because even if you use Jambo frames the performance gain is in general not that great on Modern Hardware and finally uh we added a link for uh suspend VD so if you are on the SR dis view if you have a suspend image that is named every time suspend image regardless the VM it was confusing to know which one was attached to which VM now we got a link directly uh in the VM part where you can click and know oh that's this VM got this spend image and that's fine so uh that's it for this release I hope you enjoy it um and see you at the end of March for a new one that will be probably even bigger with more things to announce so stay tuned thank you very much and bye-bye

Channel: Vates

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Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024