 Tom here from Lawrence systems. And I want to cover today how to get set up with X C P N G and their Zen guest tools. Now Zen is the underlying hypervisor used by X C P N G. So you want to make sure that the guest operating systems, the different OS as you're running in these virtual machines have the proper drivers loaded. Good news is it's really, really easy in Linux and it's relatively easy in windows, but there's sometimes a little bit of confusion about the multiple methods there are. And I want to talk specifically about UEFI and resolution and I'll cover exactly how to do that. By the way, I will link to the official documentation that is on their page about how to do this. It is all written up, but I know there's still a lot of people that may have some confusion about details. And I wanted to cover and show exactly what needs to be done to get this set up and configured and why you should be running proper drivers to get some of the more enhanced features out of your virtual machine and its interaction with X C P N G. Before we dive into those details, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, have a Lawrence systems.com. If you'd like to hire for a project such as virtualization consulting, there's a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel and other ways, there's a affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel. Right now, the first place I want to mention is going to be this forum post, which started off some of this discussion before. And this is in my forums. This was people talking about windows resolution and things like that. Not required reading for any of this. I'm going to leave a reference to it because it is where you will land if you start searching for like display resolution problems in windows. Now later they updated and I believe at the time of the forum post there, this was not updated. I believe this is updated about February when they added all the details in here, but they're all there now. It's March of 2022. All the details are in here about how to do it inside of windows. Now we're going to start with Linux first because well, it's easy to do in Linux and really simple. First, why do you need guest tools at all? XTP and G needs tools to be installed in the VMs in order to communicate with the guest operating system. This brings better performance and is required for various features. In short, always install the guest tools. The tools are made from two main components, the kernel drivers for the US and a management agent. Then guest drivers has been built into the Linux kernel for many years. All currently supported Linux distributions include them. So this is because then service been around for a really long time and it's natively built into a lot of the repositories for the most popular, which does include Red Hat and Alpine Linux. And of course the Ubuntu and the Debian world has it as well. I'm going to show you how to install it right here in Debian, but it's really the same. Just use your package manager to install it or you can if you want to load it via the guest tools ISO. So this is an Ubuntu 2004 server. We have an apt to get install guest utilities. You can see it's running version 7.10 of the guest utilities. I didn't look that there might be a newer version available to download. And it may be that the repository one in Ubuntu right now is slightly behind, but it doesn't seem to affect anything. There's not always been, or maybe there are some changes that happen over time. But unless you need the latest version for some reason, I'm generally fine with whichever one is supported on the operating system using at the time as in this, the Ubuntu 2004. So you install it and it works perfectly fine. Now that gives us the ability to do things like we can stop this VM. We can look at the network settings or just click copy and right there. We know what the IP address of this and we'll actually go ahead and hit stop. Are you sure you want to stop this? Yeah, go ahead and shut this down and it can then issue a shutdown command to that system. And if we go over here, we have my Tom Windows demo, which we'll get to in a moment. And we have this one here, which is my Windows lab server. And this one has the utilities installed. Now, because the utilities are installed in this, same thing. We have the IP address here. We can go here and hit stop. If we want, it's going to take a second to look. This is over a remote connection. We can hit stop. Are you sure you want to shut this down? Hey, look, Windows is going to a shutdown service. So pretty simple to do gives you that interactive you're looking for with the VMs that you go down through here. It is supported as well in things such as free BSD. I've done my demos on PF Sense that I've talked about loading in Zen. I have a video on setting some of this up. I'll leave links down below to that. But yes, it does work in free BSD as well. And once again, it's in the package manager for free BSD and open BSD. And they even have a write up here on free NASA true NASA. You can keep going on. Now let's get to the Windows drivers because this is the part that's a little bit more tricky when you're setting these up. Same reasons to do it. You need the optimized IO performance and the problem when you don't have them loaded is this right here, our demo system. If we hit stop on this and show you the console, make sure it's up and running. It takes a second to load, but there we go. Just a slow connection here and stop. If we hit OK, there's no interaction with the VM. So it will then opt for a forced shutdown, not not ideal. And the network is not talking. So well, we don't know that it's IP address on here inside of Zen itself. So Zen server, well, XEP and G specifically and then orchestra that I'm using is unable to communicate with this. So we get communicating. We're going to go ahead and shut this VM down, but we'll do it via the screen right here. Just go here and just do the normal boring shutdown. Now, while that's shutting down, we're going to go back over here and talk about which tools to load. Citrix tools versus XEP and G tools. There exist two different sets of tools that you can use on your own VMs. The official ones from Citrix hypervisor or the fully open source ones from XEP and G both work well. The important part is not to mix them. There's a reason that's highlighted there. We sometimes run to people who do weird things and there's forum posts on Davi about where people try to blend them together and cause their own problems. Now, the Zen tools the XEP and G team puts together are going to be fully open source. The Citrix ones are going to be as they say right here, all the benefits from the Citrix QA testing team. Citrix makes a competing product that is also based on the Zen hypervisor. So XEP and G and Citrix are using the same hypervisor. Citrix used to contribute more to the open source. They kind of don't anymore. That's why you have down here. They have stopped updating and GitHub a while ago. So the team that maintains these open source ones, well, they don't have as much up to date-ness, so to speak, as the Citrix team does. So it's up to you which one to use. But generally, I find doing the Citrix tools perfectly fine because I'm not a big open source advocate. Don't get me wrong. But I also don't see a huge desire to run an open source driver on an already closed source operating system that's pulling a lot of closed source drivers on there. If this is also the one of the simplest ways to do it. You can go ahead and download if you want to do it that way. I'm not going to cover it. I do want to cover the way we generally set these up for our clients. And it's going to be through the Windows update. And you do that here. You're going to go over here to advanced. And we're going to turn on Windows update tools. No other thing needs to be done. You check that little slider there. The VM does have to be off for this. When you turn this on, it's then going to allow it to load all the six drivers. Now, this is off by default. This is why you can, if you want, because it's off by default, then go load the other drivers, the XP and open source runs. Do not, at the same time, turn that Windows update button on and try to load those drivers. So now we can go ahead and go here, let it boot up. And now it's going to boot and load up these drivers. So we'll go ahead and watch it do this. And after a few minutes, this is what you're going to see. Zen PV storage host needs to restart the system in order to complete installation. Press yes to restart the system or no to if you plan to restart system later. So we're going to go ahead and say yes, this will just restart because then it's just loading the drivers. Windows wants to reboot whenever it loads drivers. Well, most of the time and away we go, it's going to restart and have those drivers loaded. All right. And once the system's rebooted, it'll do another check. And then we have some optional updates that we need to load under drivers. And we want to download install the Citrix net updates. This will be for all the network drivers installs relatively quickly. And of course, it wants to restart again. All right, it's restarted. So now that we can go here, go to the networking. We see the networking is working. And if we wanted to, say, reboot the machine, stop the machine, hit OK. It starts and shuts down properly. Now, the last thing we're going to talk about here, actually, let's go ahead and start this VM while we talk about it. So start this one back up is the other title in here. VM display resolution locked the original title of this post right here. And here's the documentation. Windows VM managed screen resolution for a bios VM. You could ignore this bios VM. So let you change resolution directly through the US. But if you're using UEFI for your VM and we are for this particular demo for a UEFI VM, you will need to set up your resolution in the UEFI settings for the VM for that you need to enter the VM UEFI setup at start during the Tiano Firmware logo display press escape. So when you see this come up, you got to hit the escape button or reboot it until you hit it. You see, you only got a few seconds to do this. And then it brings you up to this menu right here. So this is the UEFI setup menu. And this is where we're going to set the resolutions. We're going to go here to the device manager. OVMF platform configuration. And we're going to change the preferred resolution. We're going to bump it up a little bit. Let's say. Sixteen hundred nine hundred sounds pretty good. And let's go fourteen forty a little bigger. There we go. Fourteen forty. Commit changes and exit. Escape. Continue. Now I hit continue on purpose and not reset it because I want to show something right now is continuing. And you'll probably notice it still looks like it's at ten twenty four seven sixty eight because it is. And if you hit continue on boot, and this is where sometimes just restarting it would fix it. We're just going to go ahead and stop this. Those settings because we hit continue will be applied at next boot. So we're going to go ahead and start this back up now. Right now, try to be started back up. And you notice it immediately switched to the wider screen. So it does require one more reset. I could hit reset there. But it seems more natural to hit continue. I imagine a lot of people do that. So hopefully I saved you some head scratching of. But I changed the resolution and it didn't actually change the resolution. But actually now you can see it did change the resolution. So now we have the higher resolution in here. Go ahead and let Windows start up. Go to display settings and you can see display resolution is still locked. But it's right here. Now, as I said, this only applies if you're doing. A setup with a UEFI BIOS. If you're using normal default BIOS, then this isn't a problem. You can still control it through the US. So hopefully this resolves any problems you have loading the guest utilities. It's not too hard to do. Windows Update just slide that little slider makes it really easy to do in Zen Orchestra for more in depth discussion on this. How about my forums? Leave some comments down below or head over to the XC PNG forums. That's a great place to, you know, really dive into all the fun features and fun things you can do with XC PNG and Zen Orchestra. And I'll leave a link to all the tutorials I have on the product in case you started at the end of how do you load guest utilities and hey, what is this thing you're loading guest utilities on? I have a lot of tutorials on how to get started with this. And yes, this demo was done with the fully open source Zen Orchestra. You don't need the extra enhanced version to do these. I always build these from source so I can make it accessible for people watching this video. But if you're a business and would like to do commercial support, this is something that you can get for this as well. I like to throw it in there because sometimes people think it's just a project or a bunch of hobbyists. And honestly, this is a pretty in-depth hypervisor that is used commercially quite a bit. We know we do a lot of consulting on it with a lot of commercial companies that haven't integrated into their infrastructure. So I'll leave you with that and 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 laurancesystems.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. 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