 It is June 30th, 2019, and XCPNG is in release candidate for version 8. I have this running currently on a Dell PowerEdge in our lab, offers doing some testing, and I want to talk about some of the new features in a combination of XCPNG 8 and Zen Orchestra. I have a new series of virtual lab videos that I'm working on, and I'm going to base them all on XCPNG 8, which is going to be in full release here very shortly. So I do like the color change. Minor, I don't know if it's going to stay this way when it goes into final, but hey, it looks cool that they went with like a red color instead of the blue color. I'm assuming this is a permanent change. I didn't look through all the details on the exact color scheme changes, but this does have the ZFS installed. And that's one of the things we're going to be talking about as well. But let's just start from the top and run through the list. So here it is. And this is also a later version of the XCPNG Zen Orchestra product. So same people write both of them. They are separate products, but we'll start with the Beta 8. So Beta 8 release, it's actually in RC now. So they didn't have an RC blog post. I see I only see the Beta blog post. They've updated to kernel 419, updated hypervisor, control domain. What it's based on is still CentOS 7.5 as the base. The installer and everything works just like the previous ones does have a RAID support rate in the controller, right from the GitGo using software RAID built into Linux, which is really cool. We installed this particular machine, just an Fi, onto a thumb drive, which is an easy way to install it, because this is what they refer to as DOM zero. It's the base installer of the hypervisor. Now, if you're not familiar, I have a lot of videos on this particular topic like this hypervisor. It is fully open source. It is fully download, no licensing needed to run any of it. Now, let's move over to the Zen Orchestra. They're kind of dovetail into this. They both relate to each other because they both get a lot of features at the same time. Zen Orchestra is the layer on top that you want to use. Zen Orchestras have usually run as a VM in your Zen server stack. And some people, you know, maybe you don't like the fact that it doesn't have a native web interface, but I will tell you, Zen Orchestra is such a great interface, I really like it. Once again, this is fully open source. You can download and compile it. Or if you're a business looking for commercial support, they have a monthly subscription plan that auto updates and works really, really well. So you can get to all the full features if you want with the open source version. You just have to update and compile it yourself, or you can pay a subscription fee and they will take care of that magic for you and offer support. And their support is really great. They're very, very responsive. The team that works on both XTP and G and Zen Orchestra have been excellent to work with and, you know, join the forums, read through. You'll see a lot that they do. So they have natively added the ZFS support inside of Zen Orchestra to make managing a, or adding a ZFS storage repository much easier. And this is really cool because when we look at what we had to do previously, so this is their work instruction for ZFX on XTP and G. And it's not been fully updated. I'm sure they'll update this once it gets to eight, or maybe I'll even do some notes on changes things because there was limitations to it. Those limitations are pretty much gone. Granted, the, like the limitation of being able to transfer VMs went away. It looks like in version 7.6. And it is running ZFS on Linux in case you're wondering, nothing BSD related. They have the instructions on how to enable it, how to turn it on. And it's pretty easy. Then you just mod probe ZFS, enable it. Don't forget that stuff. I did, I don't know. I somehow skipped over it when I was setting it up. So minor detail. If you skip that, it doesn't work. The command line is still where you have to create the Z pools. So if you are thinking you can just click and grab a bunch of drives like you do in something like Freedance. No, it's not quite that simple. You do have to do the ZFS command line, but you see the commands are pretty straight, simple as Z pool create tank mirror. And you can also add extra parameters for things such as, you know, whether you want to Z1, Z2, Z3. So once this command line is all created, it works and you have ZFS. Then inside of here, you can just go ahead and grab it and say, go ahead and choose which ZFS pool you want. And it's an option in here before you'd have to follow further down the long instructions and create it manually. Not real hard to do, but it's nice when this is more automated. Now, a couple of things I will note, and we'll go here and drop to this. Because you're managing from the command line, I purposely did this. I did remove a drive and I removed the drive to do some testing. You do have to manage this. So you swapping drives and all that. Once again, all from the command line notifications. You'll have to configure that because it's not going to just tell you that a drive was dropped out. So these are a couple of things that if you want to manage it, yes, you can build nice storage pools in your server and have a single server without an external storage with the wonderful ZFS file system on it. But it does require a little bit of manual management, but it's not too hard to manage things on there when you're doing it from the command line. And there's plenty of documentation. ZFS is very well documented for doing that. But I did do this. It's working in a graded mode, but it's working. ZFS works as intended. Pulled the drive out, didn't crash, still have the data on there. That's the important part about ZFS. So I added it, that works good. Actually, I'll show you in the lab here. We go to storage pools. Here is a one SSD that I popped in. Actually, I put this SSD in the spot where I pulled out the drive that was part of the ZFS pool. And here is the 28.99 terabytes free of storage and a bunch of three terabyte drives you threw in this machine to build a big pool of them. And they're not fast drives, but they're good for storage. And so they do have a good use. And of course, ZFS being able to really expand to some large pools, definitely pretty cool here. They're going to be like said, a lot more videos coming out on how to do that in more depth. Now let's go down the list here. They did add, but it sounds like this is kind of a beta feature hyperthreading detection. If you're worried about some of the other vulnerabilities and problems with the hyperthrider being being able to disable or enable that on there. I thought that was kind of novel UEFI support. So guest UEFI now supports for both Citrix and XCPNG. And they say Citrix in here because the ZenOrchester product will manage a Citrix server or an XCPNG server. Citrix is based on Zen server as well, but closed source with a lot of license fees attached to it. XCPNG as a base is all open source. But when you're creating there, now they added UEFI as an option for the VMs. This is the part because of the virtual lab videos. I'm hoping to make some videos around this feature. It's a beta feature, but it's really slick. And I love the way they worded this because they're so correct until now to create a private network at the pool level, you had to deploy dedicated appliance for Citrix, which was closed source and only worked in Internet Explorer. It was painful to deploy and use. Both of those are true and a few people had asked me about that Citrix, I think it's called vSwitch. It just wasn't great. And what this allows you to do, and it's really amazing. And we'll look at the dev blog here and I'll leave links all these so you can read the in depth part. But essentially what you're doing is if you create that this is the SDN controller. So you have a software divine networking controller, you have a pool, you have a group of servers. This doesn't, this isn't necessary if you have a single server, which I'm going to be doing in lab videos on single server, the private networking works fine without anything special for that, that just works. But if you want to do multiple servers, so you want to create your virtual lab and you want to create special private behind networks that aren't attached to the external interfaces, like create a whole series of networking. So you can actually build, let's even say a whole bunch of VMs on their own network with their own head end and everything on this private network that is shared without the interfaces themselves. So it's not directly passing the traffic. It's encapsulating the traffic between all of them. You can create this whole software defined network on there and it's really a neat idea to be able to do this. And they're using GRE tunnels between them. And it's, it's really cool. It's a little bit tricky. That's why I was going to have it said for the demo and I said, looking at when, okay, I need to think about this a little bit more because it does require setting up some certificates on the machines to do it, but it is a neat idea to be able to have a group of servers create a virtual tunnel between all of them, as opposed to just running over network. Now, why would you want to do that as opposed to just running over network? Well, having a whole virtual, especially if you want to do it as a lab environment, let's say you were doing something like malware testing, you could create these entire lockdown virtual networks to test software, but really, really keep it sandboxed from any of the outside worlds by physically separating it from the adapter and being able to load, test it and play with it across separate servers all the same time. You could do it with a single server easily without anything special, but being able to do it across all the servers, I thought this was really a neat feature that they're building in here. And I'll be following and getting around the testing and I'm sure there's probably a right up in the form of some step by step on this, but I'm pretty excited about that this feature is getting added on here. It's definitely really cool. And I'll leave links to read all this. But that's what the up and coming is for some of the Zen server stuff. So as I said, the team is, I don't understand when someone said it's they said, Oh, I don't see enough updates from them. Like there's updates all the time. It's by far not a dead project. It's actually a project I would say is ramping up. I see more developers, more excitement, more people getting into the forums, which by the way, if you have some really specific things that you need to ask, the forums are an amazing resource of one, both going in here and just reading about it to going in and asking questions. They're working hard to have support. They've seen someone said they found some combination of Ryzen. It didn't work, but they are working to get full supports. I don't know 100% of them, but it does have Ryzen support. They're working on, you know, broad, broad support because we know with the latest release of Intel bugs and better Ryzen processors, Ryzen, especially with a lot of their newer chips are going to be very ideal for building virtualization stacks on. So I'm excited. We're going to do some testing with Ryzen as well. It's going to be one of our tests and demos that we want to build out on this. So if you have a problem like that or you have hardware that's not supported, the developers only have access to much hardware. So going through some of those details and letting them know if you have a problem, that's what helps make this product great. Like I said, the whole team in here is very responsive in helping getting this going, in helping getting things going so and developing new products. So that was it for XCPNG. Like I said that these are all the updates. I haven't done a video on them in a while, but I've been keeping up and loading new lab machines and testing it out and trying scenarios with it. I want to do a whole new virtual labs video, but I'm excited that it'll all be based on the XCPNG version 8 and all the new features that are coming with it. All right. Like I said, I'll leave links to all this so you can read about it and thanks. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to 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 want to 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 want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you want to 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 on next time.