 XCPNG version 8.0 has now been out for a couple of weeks, and we've been updating systems to it, including this system by Tech Supply Direct. They supply this to us to do some videos on, and we have an offer code to get you 10% off your purchase if you'd like to purchase this server, or one just like it, maybe not my server, but you can buy my server. Everything's for sale. You just gotta want it more than I do. Anyways, if you are looking for 10% off on there, I have an offer code below, along with some other affiliate links to get you some deals and all kinds of different tech goodies. Also, if you can take a second to click the Like button, that would be great. It does help our algorithm-driven lives. Back to the content here. So XCPNG version 8.0. So unlike the seven series of XCPNG, and if you didn't know, this is what the console looks like. I've launched it through the iDRAC system so you can see directly what it looks like. They change from the blue theme to the red theme. Of course, that's probably the most minor piece of errata in terms of updates, but I still think it's really cool. I do like the new look. I'm a big fan of the color red. Anyways, so this is running on that Dell PowerEdge R720 XD. I'll leave a link to that server, like I did a review, an overview of the server. And it'll be the one I'm doing a lot of future videos on for XCPNG, including some pastures stuff. But let's talk a little bit about this release. So the official release date was July 25th and they have a lot of details on all the fun things, but the one thing I wanna talk about right away, the new kernel installer runs the same kernel as XCPNG 8.0. So booting the installer ISO is a good way to make sure your hardware is still recognized by the new kernel. Secondly, the YUM style upgrade does not offer backamp your system. So at this stage, it's far too risky for a major upgrade. And I bring that up. They have detailed upgrade steps on their Wiki, but in short, you're gonna have to download the ISO to a thumb driver, whichever your choice is. If you still have a CD or however you're installing it. And you'll have to do that in order to upgrade over the top of seven six. Now the good news is, like they said, the ISO you download when you put to a thumb drive is going to run the same kernel. So if you have a problem with your hardware, you will know because it won't boot. If it all boots up fine, great. Go ahead and run the installer and it will install over the top of seven series. And then you'll be on the eight series and it'll preserve all your VMs and everything else. But please back up everything beforehand because you're still going from a major version upgrade. So major changes since the release candidate is pretty simple. The alternative kernel option was added. They have all the MDS security problems with the branch prediction and everything else that people, some security researchers did video on this. I had found some problems with some of the Intel processors. And if you didn't watch or didn't read through the release candidate one, we'll talk about some of the other things that are really important in there is one, they added a lot of utilities, which is pretty awesome. They updated the EMU manager and a whole lot of much better design around ZFS. So ZFS pool detection, they've made this really easy to do. So when you create a ZFS pool, I'm gonna log in over here. I did Z pool status. You set the created all from the command line as far as you create, do like the Z pool create command. You still run through that to create it. But once you create it, you just go over to Zen Orchestra, which you have pulled up here and it will detect and add the storage repositories really easily because it can say, hey, look, I see a ZFS pool. So when you select the storage type as ZFS, it can see the pools you created. So it's actually become a lot easier to do. You don't have to remember exactly like where the root of the pool is and try to mount it. It'll do it right through the Zen Orchestra once you create the pool. So first you create the pool with the disk, then from there, Zen Orchestra can recognize the pool as you create it. Now all the pool management for ZFS is still gonna be managed from the command line. So if you ever have a drive go bad or you need to swap something out or make changes to the ZFS pool, that's also gonna be run from the command line. But as far as using it as a storage pool, easy enough, you can go right here, create new storage repository and we'll go over here to storages. And here's the ZFS RAID Z pool with some disk setup on there. And it's actually transferring another run over to it right now. So if you look at the task that's copying over from the other servers, I'm moving more things over to our lab server to get ready for some more videos. But so far we haven't had any problems with version eight works really well. And the other cool thing that is in here in, let's look, it's on the final list here is all these tools that they've added too. So others can be installed depending on your needs, but they've now got DSTAT, iPerf, iPerf3, iotop. So you can just do yum install. iotop already has the latest version. And now you can have tools like iotop to make life easier to say, oh cool, we can see how fast we're writing data back and forth to the drives and see what's going on. These are really just a whole lot of different diagnostic tools, especially iPerf is an important one because I've used that in a lot of my demos to talk about speed of things. So being able to quickly install all these is wonderful and T-Mux. So if you're not filming over T-Mux, I can't run it twice, or actually I had to run it like this. So exit, you don't want to run nested T-Mux, I'm already running T-Mux. So now I can root at 172.169.27. There we go, clear. Oh, yum install T-Mux. Yes, download packages. Now I can run T-Mux on here. If you're not familiar with T-Mux, they had screen built in before, but T-Mux allows you to be able to do things like run, oops, IO top here, I'm sorry, H-Top over here. So you can see all the processor usage and then you can see the IO usage at the bottom. This is really handy having T-Mux in there to quickly split the screens. I'm glad they added this right in natively, that is huge, because if you're ever doing any diagnostics or when I'm doing some of this testing for the demo videos I have coming up, you wanna be able to try to troubleshoot or look at things that are going on when you're putting different workloads on there. And T-Mux just is a big time saver. I probably should do a whole video just on T-Mux, but in the short term, I actually learned T-Mux from my friend Jay over on LearnLinux TV. So if you type in LearnLinuxTVT-Mux or I can leave the link below, he's got some great tutorials on T-Mux. Now, the other thing you may have noticed is they did update the command line, so it doesn't have the kind of boring look they made this shell look a little bit nicer. So that's definitely a nice feature as well. And the other things that are added in here is the XoSDN controller. Now I have not dived real deep into this, but this is pretty exciting. What it allows you to do, and it's easy to do on a single server, which is create a private network. So you can actually create all kinds of virtualized private networks. Wonderful for lab testing. So you can create virtual machines that can only talk to each other that on a network that does not, you know, physically exist in the real world. It is only virtual. It's also a way to keep things contained if you're doing any type of Irish research or anything like that. But let's go a step further. They're integrating a full SDN controller to pass this between GRE tunnels between different servers. So it's gonna have support for both GRE and I believe XVLAN. And it's essentially how OpenVSwitch work, but it's gonna be natively integrated right into the whole Zen Orchestra part. So it's a Zen Orchestra working in combination with XEPNG to create an entire SDN, so software defined networking controller that will be integrated. So you can have two physical servers or more, two or more servers that have private networking encapsulation between them. This is just like I said, a really neat feature, especially when I'm gonna be in my lab videos. I'm hoping to do some testing with this later. It's gonna be a pretty advanced video to set this up because there's some trickery that I have not just take the time to read yet about how to set up GRE tunnels and how that works, like how they're implementing it with. What about the future? Because this is a question people had. The private networks created by the SDN controller are isolated, but the network could also be cycled with IPsec, because by default, GRE is an encapsulation, but not an encryption. So it does offer very fast connections between there, but no encryption. So if you were doing it anything more than your own private network between them, people would be able to tap into the traffic. So they are looking at in the future using IPsec, but you would have to right now provide external encapsulation to get this going, just an FYI. But that's it for now on XCP and 8. I guess that I'm excited. There's been so much progress with XCP and G. The platform's been amazing. I run it for our stack here at the office and we've now had a lot of clients using it. We also have been doing a lot of consulting with people who have been using it. So it's definitely a solid project. Yes, it's completely used in a lot of commercial companies now. And you can also get support right from the folks over at XCP and G. They're obviously super knowledgeable because they wrote it. So if you're worried about, how can you get support? What if Tom is the only one who supports it? No, no, no. These guys have excellent support. They sell entire support contracts for it. We usually just help people with some of the implementation or some of the basic setup of it, you can buy fully pro support from the people over at XCP and G and they made it easy. XCP-NG.com is where you buy the full support for them. And it is wonderful because 100% open source or no licenses, nothing, anyone can use this, which is awesome. So if you're a homelab builder and you're looking for a fully open source stack, this is still my go-to recommendation because of the scalability of it. It's a pretty outstanding project. All right, and thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you wanna subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you wanna hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to laurancesystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you wanna throw at us. Also, if you wanna carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you wanna help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see ya next time.