 While I really like the Zen server and it's worked out really well for my virtual lab and running my production machines and having backup Zen server the Zen center software is Windows only and I prefer to run Linux and there's been some ways to port it But I played with it. It just didn't seem to work very well But for a lot of the operations I need to do I'm able to use that orchestra the free version and it works pretty well So figure give you a quick review of that orchestra Now I said I'm using the free version because the free version works quite well But it was missing some of the features such as remote assistance auto patching rolling snapshots and Easy import export through the web interface But you can leave that orchestra connected at the same time as a Zen center and it makes it easy to manage Through a nice web interface. They do have tiered pricing. So it starts at $70 goes up to 200 500 These are monthly prices. So it's a little pricey But if you're managing a server farm and you want a nice web interface to manage them all the way across It seems like a pretty good piece of software for that. It is really easy to install. So start here at the top They have a complete automatic deploy script that you can run and It'll automatically set this up and install it as a virtual machine. It puts in two vcps two gigs of RAM 15 gigs of deep of disk space So it's really lightweight running and you only have to have it running on one server to connect all the servers So they have their couple different deployments Setting it up. I didn't bother going through the setup here as a fresh one. It's really straightforward Username X away password X away makes you change the password It defaults the DHCP, but if you type in X away network static It'll just ask you the IP address and you can set that up really there's not much to it I didn't find any difficulty or gotchas or challenges in doing it once we log into Zen server This is the view we're presented with so I'm logged into the Zen server And when you hit home, it just defaults to the VMs running Then you have some filters and I have some filters. I save like tags for production servers Non-running VMs, and if you want to save a new tag you just go here to save it I don't know how to delete a tag. I actually haven't had to do that yet Other things you can do is when you go here and click on a server You can click on the tag and it filters back up here. So this supports Being able to filter out if you have a lot of virtual machines or a lot of servers Quickly getting in and out and moving around them Now I will jump real quick here. It lets you view the templates the hosts pools and Storage and I kind of like the quick mouse over very fast very snappy Even I have this running at home. It's on a lesser server than my Dell and it's it's actually not bad at all It's very snappy even on that. It is a pretty low Processing power so to be well put together and I like these little quick mouse pop over so you can see you know How much dry space is being used and once again more filtering more tags If you wanted to create this from a management standpoint if you scaled up and manage the entire server farm It makes it very fast to do that Now it also just supports freeform typing so I taped in free nas and it narrowed it very quickly down to Storage nodes that had the word free nas in there So it's easy to go around here if you had a list of servers in here You could filter them out as well The only thing is maybe not as intuitive is when you want to rename something so by clicking on it It goes here, but if you wanted to rename it it goes in but if you want it to Actually change something you do this long press Click to edit the description here, but let's go back over to the hosts Let's say I want to edit this you long press on it and or do that So anything that maybe wasn't intuitive about it was it will let you rename servers and rename things in here But you just have to do long presses to do this and this is throughout the way this works So if I click on this it goes into it But if I long press on it I can change the name of a VM and like so this goes out throughout the whole system So if you want to change the description here long press versus just clicking it takes you into either the VM or whichever View that you're on let's get back to the VMs because that's where you're probably the most interested So we can stop a VM we can jump right to the council and the council is nice It works really well So here's their dev VPN client one that I have running and let's go ahead and type and log into it now If you notice that we do have some real-time statistics here, so we see what it's doing We can do this to hide that show that now this does not scale Anything other than the size so we can make it bigger smaller But it's not actually scaling in graphic size. It's only scale I should say it's only scaling the graphic size not actually the resolution itself so you're able to kind of move this around to whatever works more convenient for you and You can see it's a really fast I'm on the same local network of course, so it's really fast the updates the screen updates not just for text But we'll go over here VMs. Let's go over to a Windows server And it's fast even with a full graphic environment like this. So that's really not a problem When you're running remotely this does get of course a lot slower If I'm on a lower band with connection I'm outside the office VPN in and it's not a real fast connection that I'm on This does go a little bit slower But I don't generally have to get council access to things mostly because we have Linux machines I'm just sshing into things but from here. I can't stop reboot Take a snapshot or export the VMs now some of the features show up here But they don't all work So you may see all these options over here like backups and you're like Let's do a new backup. Nope upgrade needed everything just is it not nothing's great out it just Does this it brings you to the trial for anything you try to do So if you go to the dashboard visualizations statistics, these are all premium features So they're just simply everything goes to upgrade needed. So there's not much in here to use outside of this Now you can go in here and we'll show you how you add servers because that's really easy to do So here's the servers and you can Well, let's go ahead and delete one. This is not really a big deal. I'll copy the IP address So right here's the Zen backup server. We just delete it and it's gone If I want to put it back Type the IP address root type the password Whoops, I know I typed that wrong hit connect now. The only thing is it's actually going to fail Because you have to select unauthorized certificates And we just hit connect it again. And if I want to disconnect it, it's disconnected Like I said, the web interface is really snappy really fast. Now you can create multiple users in here You can create some groups, but as far as all the controls and permission once again goes back into being premium features on here So back to the VMs And we'll make sure we go back to show all of them And I'll show you just how so here's one here And let's just start the VM So as you start it, you get some real time graphs. We can look at the console. We can watch the machine booting And it's logged in now. We can also go here and stop the VM. Are you sure you want to stop it? Yep And we'll just go ahead and stop it You can see the disk you can add a new disk attach the disk change the boot order snapshot The logs it logs the different things that were done to this VM. So when it was started what was you know Shutdown startup shutdown startup Pretty basic stuff, but you get the idea that it works really well for that So there's no snapshots for this and we'll show you once this fails Ah, I already know it's failing because e0 Does that it actually does not have the fore shut down option in here. So I thought that's kind of annoying But not a big deal. It's just you know, one thing not missing But if you wanted to create a snapshot, I think you'll have a snapshot. He wants doing this new snapshot Now this is a little strange If you create a new snapshot, you may notice I didn't get a chance to name it. It just creates it So here's the new snapshot created and the same thing again. We do the long press And then we can name this snapshot Just some snapshot and long press here if you wanted to Add a description We can revert we can export this snapshot It will let you export virtual machines that part works fine. It just doesn't let you import them without doing the paid version But we can do that or if we want we can Delete the snapshot and make it go away So it's like he says pretty basic it gets the job done And it it's easy for me to see what's running or if I do have to just quickly snapshot a virtual machine Which we do even on our production machines will kind of create a snapshot before we do some type of upgrade I don't have to log into windows. It works really well for that The premium version would add a lot of nice features and it would be nice But overall, I'm pretty happy with just the basic version to get things done you can Easily get in here. It's fast. It's like it's a really easy to use go to none One more thing I will show you that it does really fast as well It's weird to me that a premium feature is to actually create a copy of a vm But not premium feature is a fast clone of it. So if we have this Copy of db9 basic. We'll just do another fast clone of it VMs and you gotta send it to non running Copy copy of db and basic or i'm sorry copy of dm basic and there's the clone. There's the clone we just made so you can you know Easily create these without going too far without having to jump out of here It's just weird. It's a premium for each or to actually copy, but they allow you to make a in-place copy which is the reference was a fast copy and zen which means Base it off of kind of like a snapshot fork is what that one is there So there's the extra new one and then we can go in here and if we don't want this virtual machine We can destroy this one as well So we go here to under advance and we can just go remove And make it go away yep and yes, there's confirmation so uh, you can Feel safe that it's going to ask you at least once before you accidentally click on something Now everything goes as a task in the background So the web interface works nice and fast But sometimes when you're doing these copies if it's more burdensome to the system It'll go in a task in the background You can move off the screen or just close the web browser and everything continues working So while zen orchestra the free version i covered here is pretty basic It really does get the job done and it's easy to use I found it really intuitive being able just to you know start stop or counsel into a vm just like that Jump right in It makes things you know pretty easy for not having to log into each time the Whole management interface and if you're on a little bandwidth connection makes that easy to do As well, just you know, we'll go in here and view everything via a web interface and be able to see what's going on You don't get any type of historical stats You only get to see real-time stats But if you're troubleshooting sometimes it's all you need to open a web interface going why is the hard drive peaked out Why is the processor peaked or why is it you know doing something basic like that the you know The basic troubleshooting stuff can easily be figured out right through the client here and not too much effort has to go into it But that's it for zen orchestra I just want to get a quick overview for it I don't think it needs unless I bought the full version I wouldn't do a full in-depth review But a lot of people just want to use it to basically you know view the vm see what's up and running and see what's going on with it All right, if you like to count in here like and subscribe If you have more questions or if you really think I should do it in more in-depth on zen orchestra, let me know. Thanks