 So I'm here from Orange Systems and we're going to talk about XCPNG and Zen Orchestra and their latest releases right here in March of 2020 And they've made a lot of changes, which is going to be great So if you want to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com If you like to hire us for a project or say hire us button up at the top If you like to support the channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on services We talk about on this channel And let's jump right into XCPNG. So I've been using the project for quite a while now Ever since their first release in the seven series now, they're at the 8.1 release candidate And I've been running the release candidate Well, they beta before it was released candidate and I've really had no problems granted I'm running it in my lab, but you know, I do a lot of videos in my lab So I can say that I'm running it quite a bit and restarting VMs. So Let's run down a few things in here a couple of highlights are gonna be There's obviously a lot of little tweaks and I'm gonna leave links so you can read all the little stuff But the big things they changed is related to the way they have the improved performance for VM Imports and exports using the XVA format this I tested. I mean, I didn't really do Strong testing like, you know exactly before I loaded after I loaded but compared to my production system I've imported back and forth and granted they are different systems, but it does seem quite fast Maybe I'm biased. Maybe I'm just a positive thinker on that storage performance improvements and new IO improvements I it does feel faster and snappier when I'm running Windows on there and running Some of the updates that's definitely It seems to improved over time, especially since we moved the system to over to beta, which is the our lab system on there Now if you don't know what it is it probably doesn't matter to you But the pair of virtualization guess is now deprecated the removing that from the system It was a way to set up pair of virtualization on there And I never did a video on it because it wasn't something I really had a need for But you know, that's that's been deprecated and removed. So hopefully it's not something that you really needed I don't know anyone that really asked me about it either support for AMD epic 7xx2 added now This is a request I know that people have been excited for is about epic support and they're really working diligently to get that support baked in here That is a little bit of a challenge because the epic has some really cool features But also that different architecture maintenance or some programming challenges around there now They did deprecate and for good reason VSS and I Think you say that QS QS. I'm not good at that word Snapshots have been removed. It never did work correctly and cause more harm than good now This is one of those things like when you're doing a snapshot and Windows Has files in motion you would want to use the volume shadow copy And I will tell you that can be a little bit challenging of trying to get the hypervisor to talk to the drivers to get that And that's why they just decided to You know getting rid of that part I kind of get it And it's not really been an issue when we've restored Windows from crashed instances and things like that or sudden Well, whatever led to Windows crashing restoring from one of those backups that were done without Windows being shut down It really hasn't been a problem restoring it Windows has become more resilient for the most part when it comes to that Well, these servers have Windows 10 is still it may break on an update, but I'm not here to pick on Windows Anyways, note that Windows guest tools version 9 the default recent version of Windows you install through the Windows update already removed VSS support even For older versions of XC PNG So for local storage, there's a lot of changes going on here and this is moving from the experimental And this is something Citrix just didn't want to do moving off of EXT 3 to EXT 4 for the local storage repositories This isn't done 100% automatically, but it's coming out of beta So there's going to be some changes on there the downside is you're not going to be able to convert some of your existing EXT to EXT 4 you'll just have to move those servers somewhere else and move them back and recreate the storage It's not a huge deal, but it's something to be noted make note of if you need that feature You know, I'd really prefer to use the XT 4 if you're loading this new and you're new to XC PNG for the first time It's going to be able to load EXT 4 natively with 8.1 So it's not going to matter if you're building anything new and you can ignore that entire part They updated more drivers VM auto start issues in beta. I didn't see this issue. They apparently some did have a Bug in there and new leaf coalesce logic for the VDIs with dynamic limits I believe this was and I've seen some discussion in forums where they had when the VMs coalesce it was for some people with larger systems It was taking a little bit too long. So they've updated some of that I have not seen in our systems any of the problems of that But I'm not running some of the quantities of virtual machines Most of the ones that we're supporting for our clients or even ours locally here They have only a dozen or so VMs and are reasonably fast machines and that all plays in part of it So the coalescence can take place with the reasonable amount of time after you do the snapshots So they do have a Improved installer and they do still support and are updated to the latest version of Linux on ZFS So yes, you can still be build ZFS on here And I believe I have a video still on that particular topic now moving over to The Citrix release you can and they reference this back and forth Guests UFI and secure boot support. So they do have all feature parity with Citrix But they do think slightly different with XC PNG anytime and this is just an overall thing Because the XC PNG is fully open source It takes them sometimes a bit longer and that's mentioned in here about adding the UEFI support if you get into details It's because I believe Citrix is using a closed source version And they only want to use pure open source top-to-bottom with XC PNG But now that feature in 8.1 release candidate is there for the open source UEFI bio So if you want that as a UES UEFI instead of BIOS as a boot method, that's an option now moving over to ZenOrchishor 5.4.4 now ZenOrchishor is the orchestration tool that runs on top of XC PNG Well runs as a VM generally is how you set it up, but one ZenOrchishor server can manage many many XC PNG servers, so I've talked about that relationship before But generally speaking you want to run it in a VM on your XC PNG server And that's how we run it ourselves now you can compile all this from source and get these features Well, or you can pay for the commercial version of it Those are both options when you're doing this and they're getting closer Beta progress on the ZenOrchishor proxy if you watch my backup and desk recovery video I did recently on ZenOrchishor and how it works the proxy option is pretty cool And it's getting closer to being you know more of a mainstream product They've added more features to it one thing about this It's a little bit tricky and there's no good documentation on how to do an open source compile for the proxy yet because it relies on some of the Lab system not lab, but hub templates and the hub templates aren't available in the fully open source version You it doesn't they have some hub templates when you use the paid version where you can just pre-install groups of Predefined servers instead of having to load and build the VM it can have some pre-defined ones It just deploys out through the hub interface that is a part of the paid system You can easily build these yourself and that's how we do them. So that's You know kind of in between if you if you're a paid subscribing member You'll be able to get that on there but the backup and continuous replication is being added as part of the proxy and with that You know if you want to dig into how that works. It allows you to manage. Let's say a remote so I can have my ZenOrchishor here and remote Lee-enabled clients who have the proxy set up locally on their machines And then I can coordinate from my ZenOrchishor here to control other servers remotely like over VPN and coordinate all the backup So it's really cool. They're working on it. It's a really neat feature This one is probably aimed at a lot of the people a Windows 10 is the one that makes me think of it the most but copy bio string From the host to VM You know how the ability to copy a bio string from the host VM in cases where using license software bound to this and Some license software is directly tied to the bio So they've added this as an option and we'll show what that looks like a UI improvements clickable SR graph this I like a lot too and max V CPU configuration You can now define a max virtual CPUs and VPN and will have the ability to use them in creation and advanced settings So you don't just define the CPU and cap limits. You can Define that as well. So let's actually look at how this works Oh, and the last thing is this audit log, which was in here. I believe it's at the top But the audit log we're going to show to this is really slick. So let's go over here This is the fully open source compiled one as you can see I have no support and I've said this before in videos I have the paid version. I have the open source version. I like to get people started on XC PNG I like to see people using it for their home lab Therefore I like to show that you can completely do this for free with the open source version So I recompiled it just before doing this video to have the latest actually to have five five seven three It's slightly newer than a release because I pulled some of the latest code But it's got the features that we're talking about here Let's start with that audit log. So we go over here and let's look at the audit This is really cool in a professional settings environment because you want to know when someone did something like I changed the network interface So let me go change it again. So we go over here. I'm gonna go to this Debbie and server here running Let's go to the network and I'm a swap it to There I'll just move it over to a different network. So now I change the network interface so if we go over here to Audit log we can see that Tom and Laura systems and this was the IPM logged in from a matter of fact I'd started it if you go back in the log I'd done some stuff from my office. So same user but different IP address the dot 18 is my laptop dot 9 is my Desktop, but you can see I changed the virtual interface on there So it doesn't give you the virtual interface name. It gives you the UID of it So there's complete traceability to reverse this and figure out what actually was changed if you had to Maybe in the future they'll do it. So it actually just says which interface I swapped it from and to but either way It's got the information of Network ID here and what I changed so it's completely auditable and I do like this feature Especially if you have a multi-users using this, let's say a larger corporate environment Knowing what each user did and what each is your changed is pretty important now Let's look at this as well if you go back in here counsel Actually by changing that I should get a different IP address. What was that 10 to 11? Actually, I change it both ways. So should be back at there But we'll exit out of this and we'll go back over here to the servers Audit log and you can see that it shows that I went in there So now you know someone access the virtual machine directly and they have an integrity checking system here And you can create a fingerprint and verify the fingerprint for integrity So that way if someone were to get in here and make changes you'd have a log on her That's actually a feature that I think is really handy Especially if you want to deploy this and I've seen this deployed in some larger environments now when we go back over here to like these storage and Well, let's click on this and just different ways to get to it But this is living here and we get the nice mouse over and we have these different Details because we see one base copy one snapshot It's called the wonders 10 drive and you can get the idea of the different things running on here This is important because there's a lot that goes on and there you go What are all these things taking up my storage and you can get an idea? So let's go back over to and let's make another snapshot for example. So snapshot We've created a couple more go back over and look at it And it'll now have more snapshots listed for there And it's showing the amount of disk space each one of these is taking up And of course you can look at it this way to dig into it And see all the snapshots on there and to go back over to here like the PSN slab See these are the ones I don't need delete delete And you can see I'm listed here for coal There's a depth of two to coalescence that while that's coalescing. I wonder if they show up. So let's go back over to general Actually, I just see them disappear. So they're they're coalescing and it right before my eyes look like it moved a little bit Yeah, it's getting rid of little snapshots the old ones But yeah, I like this feature to be able to have that on there now The other thing they had is when you look down here is the option to show you which hosts need updates There's no updates needed So I can't show that feature but it shows them right here and Says all right this pool and if you have multiple poles you're managing I'll show which ones are missing patches and updates and because there was some updates the other day to bring Me to the latest 8.1. So let's look at the host and you can see I'm on Xcp ng 8.1 on gpl v2 So gives you idea the system and says what's on there and if there's any updates, but like I said, I've got it fully patched So I don't have any any updates to show you and the last thing is when you're creating those new VMs It's to show you where that button is so we'll create it on this particular pool here and Look under advanced Well, we got to select a template first any template really now we got that option Copy bios to VM saying so you can copy the bio string like they showed in the wind in that first Many menu I showing so you can copy the bio string if you have something licensed to the bios Bio strings in there. So that's it for the new updates for Zen Orchestra on Xcp ng. I'm excited I will be doing some new videos now that they're in the eight series of getting started I still have my getting started with 7.4 But I was just there's some changes to the installer especially with 8.1 I was waiting for that because it changes some of the like the defaults with the ext4 file system being created And I have some new servers on order that we're going to be installing and so before they get installed I'm going to walk you through how to set up Xcp ng on them and walk through the whole process with the I'm assuming pretty soon with it being released candidate It'll be under full release But even not the release candidates are released is probably not going to change the installer much But I'll be doing some new getting started videos with that. You know, there's a lot of updates There's a lot of changes that have come over the years with the product So if you want to learn more about Xcp ng, I'll mention it head over to their forums and it's great If you have a lot of questions, just go through and read through there a lot You'll see a lot of the interesting deployments people have and some of the large-scale stuff on that And I've told people as they ask sometimes in the YouTube comments a lot of questions I'm like if you spend a little bit of time in a forum just reading through the product You'll see there's a lot of little details a lot of advanced features a lot more to talk about than I just covered in here But I'm overall really happy with the project and excited to see How much progress it's made since they launched it of you know been a little while now since you launched it in the seven series But they quickly are adding quite a few features And if you have other suggestions and feedback and features the forums their forums is a great place to talk about that I just wanted to leave that out there mention about only links where you can find these blog posts as well And we're to get started with it. 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