 Tom here from Morning Systems, and the latest version of Zen Orchestra has a really cool backup feature that's been added. It's not fully flushed out yet. There's still some details we worked out, but I want to talk about it because there's a lot of excitement I have for this particular feature, and I'm not just saying it because it came from the development team engaging on one of my live streams about ideas people would like to see implemented in XCPNG and Zen Orchestra. Now a little bit of background, XCPNG is the hypervisor, Zen Orchestra is the web-based orchestration tool that can have a one to many relationship and manage all of your Zen hosts. So one instance of Zen Orchestra can manage many, many hosts of XCPNG. Now I have a whole playlist I'll leave a link to down below for all my videos for getting started and some of the different aspects and how to do things in XCPNG. And I have a disaster recovery video on it, but this is a whole next level that I'm excited once this comes a little bit out of beta and more into full production, but I wanted to talk about it to one, share with the audience here and listen to the feedback. And this also goes back to the feedback you can give over in the forums and have just good discussion with the developers of this project. Then new features called Restore Health Check. For even more data safety assurance, we have added the possibility manually for the time being to perform test restorations. This restoration will work in the same way of a classic VM Restore, but at the end of the test, the VM will be removed. Now this process is essentially automating your disaster recovery testing. Is any untested backup as well? Wishful thinking. We really hope it backed up. It did pass an integrity check when it backed up, but will it restore? And you want to run tests once in a while to assure that those restorations will do exactly as you expected and the VMs will boot up because you don't want to be doing this under duress when you really need those backups and be stuck at like a blinking cursor from Restore, where you have to sort out exactly what in the process may have gone wrong. Now, the other problem and challenge is, of course, if you have production VMs that you're backing up, they're probably running all the time. So when you do these test restores, you want to isolate them so they're not interfering with the existing production VMs. So that's why it disables all the network cards and then boots up the VM. Now the next challenge is if it doesn't have network communication, how do you know it booted up? Now other software that does this other commercial backup programs will do things such as grab a screenshot. And that's one of the ways they can give you assurance. But the way it's done in here right now, as far as they've written it, is wait for the VM guest tools to be up. I think this is a very clever way of doing it because the VM guest tools talk to the hypervisor and give status information. Well, status information being given means it has booted up and applications are up and running. I mean, it's not going to do a full test to make sure the database queries exactly right. But that's usually not a big deal if the VM itself boots and gets all the way into the operating system, which it would for these guest tools. And I think this is a huge step forward. Now they could probably integrate some of that screenshot because maybe that matters, you'd like to see a login screen. But in the case of both Linux or Windows VMs, the VM guest tools running to me seems adequate enough to tell you that the restore process worked. Now let's go a step further and talk about a little more details on this in terms of some more ideas. And this is, as I said, why I wanted to kind of engage the community on this, as I think where this planning could go is have an entire backup that not only backs up and does these test restores, but then does those test restores on maybe another system. So one Zen Orchestra instance can manage many XCPNG pools, many XCPNG hosts, and maybe you have a separate backup pool you have essentially your DR planning, or maybe these are even all the way off site, then actually spinning those up and doing the DR testing on another site because, well, that's part of your DR plan. So I like that this is all being integrated in here. And this is one of those cool things just overall about Zen Orchestra is having not only just backups built in so we're not relying on third party, we're doing it all in one place. But then to go a step further and go through our DR testing, I'm just pretty excited about this feature. Now, Zen Orchestra 5.7 offers a lot of other cool features. I'll leave a link to the blog post. They've added finally for those of you who have been aggravated by the inability to upload ISOs to the SMB share that's been added. They also added the ability to now export OVA, not just XVA. So if you want to export something out of Zen Orchestra and bring it into something like VMware or VirtualBox, that feature has been added, as well as updates to their proxy implementation, the proxy allows you to have your Zen Orchestra platform and providing the mythical always sought after an IT single pane of glass, what actually does work for your VMs. So by having your Zen Orchestra run maybe at your primary data center, the proxies allow you to still manage and pass off jobs to the proxies at the remote locations at different sites, this is a really nice feature and they've done more revamping to streamline that process. They've also done some updates to the way it handles DNS caching. If you've looked at the way Zen Orchestra does API calls to each of the host's during backups, well, there's a lot of activity and they did some DNS caching to minimize the activity and essentially streamline the service. As I said, I'll leave links to everything down below, including the blog posts, you can dive into more details, head over to their forums to engage with the community over there. However, my forums to engage with the community I have as well, I always encourage people to keep furthering the discussion and keep developing the product. It's pretty exciting to see where they started to see where they're going and to see what the future holds for them for a lot of these exciting features. That's why I make a lot of these videos because like I said, it's something we use actively ourselves. And we work with a lot of very large companies that use it as well. It's been a pretty amazing project. And I do know from the conversation I had with the team over at Vates that they've got a lot more to come. So stay tuned. 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. For deals, discounts and offers, check out our affiliate links in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly. So check back frequently. And finally our forums. 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