 So I hadn't done a Zen server video in a little while. Yes, I'm still using it. Yes, it still works wonderful. And yes, they've progressed a lot on a project. And I'm specifically talking the XCP-NG server. So that's a different than the Citrix version of Zen. Citrix is added to make some license changes that were less than pleasing to the community. And these guys said, why not make it all open source? And we moved everything over to XCP-NG. Don't worry, if you installed based on Citrix, you can install this right over the top and bring all your VMs and settings along with it. And that's what we did. We did an in-place upgrade. And I really do consider going fully open source with this and upgrade, which is great. And they finally have recompiled and got this pretty much on Citrix, I might want to call it, which is the XCP-NG center if you want to use this. This is the Windows version of the management tool. This is different than Zen Orchestra. Now, is there an exact difference between them? They are two different things. This is XCP-NG center, which runs in Windows. Doesn't seem to work real good in wine. I know there's been some work to try to make it work that way but I hardly ever use it because I use the Zen Center, Zen Orchestra software, which I actually like a lot better. Now you can do pretty much all the same things in both of them, but Zen Orchestra does go another step and has, for example, a really nice backup system and some other tools to orchestrate how a Zen server works. And I'm really happy with that. Now, you can, like I said, use this for pretty much all the other features, importing, exporting VM, shutdown, reboots, and lots of other things, managing storage pools. It does have these cool pretty graphs. So if you need to see CPU usage on something, it's a little different than how Zen Center works. And of course, this is easy just if you're in Windows, install it and it works versus if you can get the community edition of Zen Orchestra for free, but you have to pay if you want all the advanced features or you can compile it yourself and they have instructions on how to do that, which means it doesn't automatically update and it doesn't easily configure. It's not like just a drop-in plug-in. There's some effort that has to be put in on your part to make it work or you can buy the paid version which comes with full support and everything else and their support is really good. The admins for this are very responsive but let's get into some of the details and some of the changes. So I'm gonna go ahead and close this and pop over to Zen Orchestra. Now I'll start here and leave you first with this GitHub link. This GitHub link is a Zen Orchestra installer updater and I did this based on Debian. It's pretty straightforward. You can grab clone the script in GitHub and it will build out or even use a Docker build for Zen Orchestra and setting it up. This is for the community edition and I have been using this to update it. Now there's some details of some of the pre-rex and different things you have to have loaded in order to get this working. So it's not a turnkey system. It does take a little bit of Linux knowledge and your part to get it going. Or as I said, you can use the free version of that but you will not get every feature if you use the free version. So I'm using the community edition right here and like I said, if you're a home user, community edition is fine. If you want this in business, they have paid support packages and like I said, their support's really good. Their full version is really nice, adds a lot to it. But this is pretty much looks the same. They've done lots of little under the hood enhancements so we're gonna talk about them real quick. And so this is the Zen Orchestra 527. They just released this in September. And there's a lot of little things like the understanding which virtualization modes are shown and it displays it right there. So let me pull up like anything it tells you. All right, this is hardware virtualization with pair virtualization drivers. And I'll leave links to all this because they have a lot of details for those who don't wanna dig into it. But for brevity, we're just gonna cover how this basically works. They've also added a neat feature so you can choose the emulation of the network card. So you are actually able to go in here instead of the real tech, you can do an Intel E100. And this is how it emulates the network interface for the virtual machine. And that may be very helpful to some. The real tech E819 is a really popular, well-supported network card but you may want some virtual machines to run the Intel E100. And it's just an emulation system. I recommend actually loading the Zen tools once you have the VM set up. But of course that's not always possible if you're running VMs with older pieces of software. And sometimes that's one of the use cases for running virtual machines is you have some old archaic pieces of software that you kinda wanna set up in its own VM because you have some use case for it. And we have clients in that situation running out-of-date software because it runs specialized equipment. So they updated the way the task views worked and you can do last scene tasks and let you search through them, which is kinda cool. Restore whole folder. So no need to individually file manually like before. One click and you get the whole folder content restored. I've never really played with this. This is a full version feature. Be able to break down a VM and restore files within. It's kinda neat that that's an option though. So you can take your VM backups but you only wanted a file but you know it's in the backup and you weren't running some other type of backup that would be easier than that to do. But yeah, you could do this. That's kinda cool. Restart all failed VMs in a job. That's kinda cool too. Cause when you have a job management setup and this is one of the reasons I like this, you can go a step further was in orchestra and set up jobs, scheduling, and actually orchestrate as a kinda the name implies situations to happen. So they've really upped this and added a lot more features and understanding how this works including like the being able to restore a job. So that's enough for these in orchestra updates and this is the XCP-NG 7.5 update and got ahead of myself there but this is the ZFS support that was added. It's in kinda beta but it gives you something to play with and I know someone's going to comment why aren't you using Proxmox because I don't think I've ever done a virtualization video at all that someone says I should be using Proxmox. And I know Proxmox does have ZFS support and they're working on it here in XCP-NG which is pretty cool so they have the instructions here how to enable it. So that's among the features of 7.5 that's kind of interesting. Now what I also think is really cool is that they are doing upstream pushes to Zen server. So they're actually talking about exclusive bug fixes not that they want them to be exclusive. This is open source. Citrix can take these and I believe they're all pushing them back to the Zen project so there's nothing stopping Citrix from doing these as well. This is one of the things I really like about the XCP-NG project is they're not just solving problems and added features, they're also quashing bugs and pushing it upstream. So it's not like they're trying to cut anyone out of this. You know what I mean? This is the beauty of open source software so you can see what's going on there. Supported pool increase size is 64. So you can now have 64 hosts per pool and that's kind of neat. So they're expanding even more features than beyond. Of course as hardware gets better and sometimes you just have to run a lot of things in VMs you can run more of them which is really cool. And of course they do have if you didn't know, they do have their XCP-NG Pro support. And this is really cool. This is kind of their business model is they have XCP-NG.org and .com and they're not selling you two different versions. They're only selling you a support option. And like I said, from a business standpoint this is really nice because hey, here's all the open source software we keep developing a project but you have special needs or special help you need for this server. They have pricing and everything like that. So $600 per host per year for a commercial support not bad at all and they have different agreements here. So I just wanna talk about that and mention that is an option. So if you're thinking about using this in your enterprise environment you absolutely can and have the support for it. Now in the latest in September release they had they had an incremental update it's still 7.5 but they added something that's pretty cool that wasn't built in before. So I have mind systems built on top of hardware rate arrays on my Dell servers but if you wanna add software rate arrays for the install they allow you to build mirrors with it. So they now have integrated that into the installer so you can build a mirror. So it does not take a lot to install as in server because it generally runs in a smaller piece and then you have your storage array. This is separate from your storage array. This is your essentially boot array and they allow you to create now software rate. Like I said, I'm running hardware rate on mine so it's kind of a non-issue but if you wanted to take a few small drives because you don't need a lot for the boot of this like a small pair of SSDs you could then build this and to a rate array using your standard Linux MDADM RAID tool. So pretty slick and it's part of the built-in installer now so there's nothing difficult about it. I got this was kind of novel they're offering a net install ISO. What this will do is allow you to pull a smaller ISO boot and grab the rest and pull it down. Novel feature, it's not, I'm not too much of a, I don't, I guess it's neat. I don't have a good use case for it. I just download the full version, install it. I've got plenty of thumb drives to install it from that are big enough to handle the full size load but I guess it's kind of cool because some of the net installs are nice because then you can keep the net install and the temporary will always pull the latest version but I generally like to have it right there because just my habits of the way I do things. Now they do have and available soon here and you can read through and I'll leave links to this of course to the status of XTP and G7.6 they have a beta and they have some of the more changes they're gonna be making inside of Zen server. Apparently there's a few things broke but hey, it's beta and I'm not ready to run this for my system but it's definitely watching the progress of the project and here it is, this was released in September, this is October 1st and we still see updates from the Oliver Lambert, the primary admin for this. They're very active and this is something I really like is you see a lot of activity in the entire development process. They're very responsive in quashing bugs and in developing this product so it keeps me using it, like I know, I know there's someone screaming, I love Proxmox and I don't think there's anything wrong with Proxmox, I have a friend who really enjoys using it, he's using it for some container stuff that it works really well for. I don't really have any containers and it's not a use case I really have, I just like Zen server but I don't hate Proxmox, I don't understand people think if I like one product I must dislike the other. I started on this one, all my stuff's built in it, it's been working fine and we have several servers that I migrate back and forth when we're moving things around for updates and it's always worked so I've just continued on with Zen server, we have clients using it in production and we have been just loving it because it works really, really well so I don't have big use cases which but those are a few updates from Zen server, still using it, still loving it, no real issues, the updates went smooth, I didn't do them as soon as they came out because while I was busy doing lots of client projects and they weren't any something so major glaring security hole that I had to do it right away so yeah, I got lazy and waited a little bit but we updated clients first, sometimes it's just a matter of scheduling and timing and getting all done but we're all up to date on the latest version and I figured I'd give you an update on this. Thanks for watching, if you liked this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up, leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just wanna say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, you can hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications, hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you wanna contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. Also, if you wanna help the channel in other ways we have a Patreon, we have affiliate links, you'll find them in the description and you'll also find recommendations to other affiliate links and things you can sign up for on launch systems.com. Once again, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.