 I'm here for Lawrence Systems and XCPNG is now at version 8.2 and there's a new version as an orchestra as well. I haven't done a video a little bit so I'm going to cover some of the news and things that are at least exciting to me and maybe to you if you clicked on this video about my favorite open source hypervisor. Before we jump into the details, let's first. If you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out, well, randomly. So check back frequently. And finally, our forums, forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now, back to our content. Now, for those of you that aren't familiar with the project, I will leave links down below to other videos where I've dove deep into all the functions and features. And there's a lot of them for this entirely open source project. I like to remind people that this is something that you can get for free to get started. It is one of my favorite ways to build out home labs because it supports full software defined networking so you can build out essentially like virtual infrastructure with it, tie together physical servers with virtual land. We're going to talk about some of those new enhancements they have around that. And of course, the fact that, well, it's completely free. And this is kind of cool. And I've got videos on how to build it all right from the source code. But let's talk about the new features and updates. Now, we do have my server running XCPNG version 8.2. And I want to talk just briefly on how you get to version 8.2. Right here, I have my XCPNG upgrade demo. And I just want to cover this really briefly. And this is how you update the core of XCPNG. And if you're wondering how you set something like this up, in case you want to build an XCPNG inside of an XCPNG that's referred to as nesting, and you have to turn on to make this function nested virtualization, this little option right here under Advanced. This is actually kind of fun if you ever want to nest something else, another hypervisor for testing. Probably not the ideal thing for production, but for lab environments, it's pretty cool. So we're going to take this real quickly and show you from 8.1 to 8.2. And it's done as easily as edit the, actually I typed VIM, but I know vise was built in, etsyumrepos.dxcpng.repo. Then we're going to quickly do a search and replace. And what that command does in vise goes through and finds all the 8.1s and switches them for 8.2s. Then we save. Then just do a upgrade. It'll go out, fetch the new updates and the changes, download them, and say, hey, would you like to download the new version, and say yes. Now, this is good for point upgrades. This is not a good idea if there's a full version upgrade, like going from seven to eight, but from going from 8.1 to 8.2, this is all you have to do, then stop all the virtual machines running on it, restart it, and now you're at the new version. Now let's talk about some of the new features. Now the first thing of note, this is going to be a long term support version. Xcpng 8.2 LTS, so five years of support is going to be on there. That's actually pretty cool, and they're going to offer extended support as well. And you don't have to jump on 8.2 if you're nervous about upgrading, but I haven't had any problems in the systems that we've updated, and go check their forums. There are pretty active people talking about problems they may have had, or challenges that they may have faced with the upgrade. Most of them have been around some issues with Zen Center not being completely compatible, but I don't use Zen Center. I do everything with Zen Orchestra, so that really hasn't been an issue for me. And I haven't had any other issues. A few of the main feature support is UEFI support. Now, I've been testing this a little bit. I don't really use it much. I've always just left things at BIOS. Maybe I'll do some testing in the future, but I know this is a request a lot of people had that it get UEFI support, so they've now baked this all in. OpenFlow Controller Access. They've been doing a lot of updates and adding functionality to the software-defined networking controller. This is really fascinating to me because this allows you to have Zen Orchestra coordinate physically different hosts and then create essentially virtual lands between them. So you can have your infrastructure built essentially without any actual network interfaces that are physically connected to other interfaces, so you'll be able to tie these systems together. Eventually, it does have to go out of an interface to get to the other side, but you could put your firewall and a public IP address on there, have all private IP ranges in the back end, and this just allows a lot of flexibility. And it is really slick the way to keep adding more and more features and encryption between the way the two devices talk to each other, so you're able to transport this between servers securely, create a secure back end network. This is really cool for both lab work or even production work where you need to have, let's say a series of servers, database servers, or web servers on the back end, communicating with each other, but then only one front end interface where you expose everything. There's been a lot of work on this and for people who design hosting infrastructure, this is really cool, so you only have to have every one little piece of public facing as opposed to having all of your back end public facing and firewalling it off, which has of course led to many problems and misconfigurations where people use a lot of public IPs to pass database servers and have them talking to web servers and locking them down. This way, if you keep it all on the private side, you can keep those locked down completely and only expose things as needed. I haven't tested this, but I think it's kind of neat that they're working on it. And I know some people are gonna hammer out, just use an AMD processor to solve this problem and that sounds reasonable until you realize the number of Intel servers that are susceptible to the Spectre meltdown problems. And the mitigations to them were frequently turning off cores and just shutting it off until we know more. Well, now we understand more that the potential for things to be broken between two different VMs running, if they share a core, there's the potential using the problems discovered with the Spectre and meltdown that they're maybe able to have some data exfiltrated or figured out based on the timings and a lot of other details. This is core scheduling, which allows you to keep hyperthreading on and group together the CPUs, the VCPUs, of a particular thread to a particular VM and kind of fixing and mitigating that. This would allow you to not have to take as much of a speed hit and dedicate those cores to it. It's interesting. It's something maybe I'll play around with. I think it's kind of a cool that they're working on some solutions to that because, well, I mean, the other solution is replacing your hardware to gain the feedback and that's not always feasible and fits in everybody's budget. Now, this is something that's been asked about a lot is when will it get Seth and Gluster? I've seen people comment before on this. And yes, Seth and Gluster are now in the experimental phases, but being integrated in. I don't usually use these or they're definitely in use case for them for very large designed systems. I'm more of a ZFS person and using external storage but natively building this and I still think it's the right step because obviously there's a demand and there are companies that I've talked to that are using this at scale and well, it makes sense for them to be using those. They've added some updated Intel CPU support and previously I mentioned they have also added some of the new AMD support. So we're seeing all the more modern processors become supported in here. Now this is based on CentOS so the kernel that comes with the CentOS as long as their support for the same version of the kernel they use is generally support for the hardware in XCPNG. Being it's all Linux based, it actually has quite a broad hardware support. Now worth mentioning as well is XCPNG and Vios. Now Vios is a command line driven very high performance, very feature rich firewall type operating system and they have now natively built in all the drivers and work great with XCPNG. This goes back to that building your virtual infrastructure and having it perform really well and all those firewall functions. Well, you can load Vios on here. I've done other videos of it working with PF Sense. I'm not a big Vios user. I played around just a little bit with it. So before someone says, when are you gonna do a video on it? I don't know when. It's not something I do a lot of but if I get into it in the future I'll certainly be doing some videos on it. It's really popular in data centers and in really high intense operations and of course being built into the hypervisor if you're looking at doing a hosting storage build out this is kind of a cool combination of using Vios with all of its performance tied into XCPNG for your hosting stack. Now released today is Zen Orchestra 553 and one of the things are really working on a lot and this has been a refactoring of a lot of code and a lot of efficiency brought in is the way the backup system works. And there are two different methodologies in here. One of them is if you're running everything in your own stack, Zen Orchestra and it's tied to your Zen server, backups are relatively simple. I've got a couple in-depth videos on that but it's all happening locally. What if I wanted to run my controller here at my office but in my data center kick off a backup but still use the control plane from the Zen Orchestra in here. Well the challenge would be getting the data back and forth so this is where backup proxies come along and what a backup proxy does is allow you to designate a VM to proxy and handle the orchestration of moving the VMs around and doing the backups of them which may be real data intensive and move them around to your local storage and create the snapshots. That is great because that'll all happen over there and you're just sending the commands over to here and the results are coming back to your local machine. So when they started revamping all the code for this this brought them into improving a lot of backups overall. So the refactoring of that code is slowly working its way into the local code as well and especially we're gonna see better support for doing the delta backups, the incrementals. And the worry of an incremental backup is that you could have a broken piece of the chain and the way the merger requests go by refactoring this into a more efficient way. They are going to be able to mitigate that risk. They already do verification to make sure this works but this is gonna add some more robustness and a more efficiency efficient way to get this done. So I'm excited about the improvements on here so we're gonna start seeing more backup code and make it a lot more efficient. Now one of the things they did add of note in here and it's been added for a little while is when you're doing the delta backups you're able to specify after how many delta to start over and do a full backup because each delta is changed. So each one is a incremental change to the previous and if you corrupted a delta in the middle you could have a real problem. If you didn't know that delta was broken and you tried to restore it well then you'd have a really big problem. And the way you mitigate that is you do a full backup every now and then and they have the option to specify that but their refactored code is gonna make this whole system much more efficient. So I'm looking forward to a lot of that. And the last thing I wanna cover is Terraform. This is really slick if you're doing the whole code as designing infrastructure. Terraform is a cloud platform agnostic tool for building changing and versioning infrastructure and they've tied all this together with Zen Orchestra and this is really cool. I don't use Terraform myself but I know a few people that use this at scale to build out large scale projects because well when you have to spin up a few hundred machines you don't wanna have to use some web interfaces as slick as it might be. There are tools to make this even easier especially when you want to auto deploy, auto spin up things as needed and then destroy them later and have a lot of flexibility where you do this all in a script. Terraform is a great answer for that and now they have built in so you can build these Terraform template VMs and then have Terraform tie into this to be able to set up your deployments. So that's a really cool integration on there. Check the blog, there's more details than I could probably cover in an hour but this will of course lead to me doing some updated videos because in some of the previous videos I would have said things like it doesn't have SEPH or Gluster support and now it does have SEPH and Gluster support. So with all the excitement, all the new versions I will of course be doing some new getting started videos and I wanna do some in depth from scratch builds to show how you can use Zen Orchestra and XCPNG to fully build your own open source lab and this is a very accessible tool because well the code's all there and free and it's open source and it's a lot of learning. If you wanna dive into hypervisors and if you wanna look at people who run things at scale head over to their forums. There are some large deployments that you'll see people mentioning and talking about some of the things they're doing. It's a pretty outstanding project and just keeps getting better all the time. The dev team can't say enough good things about them. They are very responsive and very open about how they do everything. That's just a beauty of open source development. All right, links will be below to the individual blogs and some of the other videos I have on this topic. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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