 XC PNG server. This is a talk I've done in a couple open source events. I Wanted to follow up with a YouTube video for those of you that couldn't make it to the event and for all the people on YouTube That may have an interest in this This is not a step-by-step tutorial of how to set up Zen server I have that video already and I will link to it This is the big picture view overview of the functionality and history behind XC PNG And so it's a good video if you want to understand some of the functional systems of how it works and features Without just jumping into an install So let's get started So first thing I have to do is separate Zen from XC PG and G server or from Citrix Zen is a virtualization system supporting both pair virtualization and hardware assist full virtualization names them from Next generation virtualization initially created by University of Cambridge computer laboratory under open source GPL to license So they still exist Zen is the hypervisor portion of this much way that the Linux kernel is in many distributions for Linux the Zen hypervisor is By itself the hypervisor But the spin that we won't speaking of today is XC PNG and I'll be talking a little bit about Citrix as well Those are basically packaged feature complete We'll almost feature complete become when it comes to Citrix the Zen project being wrapped in and turned into a Easier to use product now. I pulled up a couple companies that are still using Zen server You may have heard of Orion VM or maybe those Amazon folks easy to use Zenverization exclusively however in November 6 2017 Amazon announced a new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the KVM hypervisor called Nitro So there's always been some debate about this that some people said they're moving away from Zen server Maybe I don't know I know that they announced this they But for the most part only the C5 family, which is not the largest part of the EC2 system So that kind of makes Zen pretty huge now. I'm not talking about XC PNG or Citrix and server I'm talking about the Zen server open source project Orion VM. I believe still use it. They're another big Solution provider that's based on that And like I said, these are not these are running their own custom versions of it for well Obvious reasons when you do it at the scale Amazon does you can't just say Oh, I'm just gonna load this on all these servers and try to manage it That could be a little tricky at the scale Amazon operates So I'm sure they have a lot of customization that went into the same with the folks over at Orion And there's I'm sure there's a lot of other companies that are using this The history of XCP starts with Citrix. Citrix has been a long time popular distributor of the Zen server software Citrix's implementation Was kind of a hybrid. So you paid for support We got it for free paid for support and some of the extra features had a license fee attached to it And then all of a sudden Citrix made a change Well a change isn't an update. So on December of 2017 They went ahead and updated to 7.3 But they just took out features and said, oh, yeah, by the way, you need a license So a lot of people updated and seen the fixes But didn't realize that the patches in there also included removing features that they would then hit you for a license fee To turn on so this didn't set well with the Zen community and it's not like you can just rip everything out once you're in the Zen server market To switch over to a different hypervisor because it's a lot of work And you've probably got a lot of tooling built around this and you know So it was a big shock to the market and my guess is Citrix thought they could just milk the market going Hey, how do we make more money? Just start charging for stuff that we weren't charging and add License fees to stuff that didn't have license fees before So that didn't go well with things. So these folks over at xcp and g who are the same people that have Zen orchestra So they started the cloud project the xcp Zen cloud project new generation will offer an alternative to Citrix Zen server And it didn't take time at all for them to go from their 6,000 I'm a 6,000 euro goal to end up with 38,000. So they actually got overfunded on this There was a lot of excitement myself included because I was a Citrix Zen user and source on my clients And their product goes right over the top including having all your vms all your settings copied right over because well They based off the same source code. So the it was very pain-free to just upgrade again from Citrix upgrade to a open source upgrade xcp Ng is usable from the sources very easily where it continues improving upgrade The update process to make it even more tricky now using yum This is one of the departures that make it different from the Citrix Zen server They actually have yum updates built in. So I definitely think that's kind of cool Citrix has only their patch system. Uh, that was this is where they start to depart for the most part If you've seen all the Citrix features, they're they're going to be the same except for these ones here Which more features are being added So xcp ng will accidentally all the features is in commercial Zen server commercial edition for free And this is where Citrix has licenses for different things like zen motion Being able to move vms and dynamic memory all that's just included with the xcp ng version So xcp ng has gathered a real community of users developers committed to a success long term. It really has spent any time in their forums their Developers answer questions are really on top of things Feature changes and stuff like that have been coming really fast So it's added so much more now and it's hard to cover everything But basically they've added more file system support than Citrix ever did They've added a lot of features that are kind of neat Especially for some of the homelab people So it's starting to gain traction there in the homelab because they're supporting zfs They're supporting some of these other things that people wanted that Citrix never did Plus you get all full features for free under open source GPL license now xcp ng has pro support for production environment support is the only thing you'll ever pay for We only provide support no license keys. This is kind of neat. So you have xcp ng.org where you get everything Downloadable for free with full feature sets enabled or you can go to xcp ng.com and that allows you to buy support packages to Help you set things up because a lot of us get busy if you're not familiar or you don't you do this every day You have a virtualization stack that you just want to really focus on supporting it If you're a lonely it guy or just don't have enough time to really dig into it You can just buy support packages very reasonably from them as a dot com So that's their business model and this works the same way for there's an orchestra product Which we'll talk about later and their xcp ng product So they do have paid support, but there's no license fees for it, which is really nice I love things that are open source. I don't mind paying and I have no problem buying and paying for support products. I like the fact that there's not a license. I don't have to go activate some license server that may or may not Change features on me as they see fit and like citrix did so this is all gpl licensed Now all this only came about earlier here in 2018 But here we are in november 2018 and this is their website They've gone through a couple revisions and cleaned up the logo and it's really slick everything's on github first Everything's developed in the open on github, which I love So you can interact with the developers. You can see what's going on. You can see what features are coming. You can try out the betas 4 000 plus forum posts 800 forum contributors it it's grown and really pulled away from Into a community that's very helpful that has a lot of people talking about very large scale deployments And how they're using it and it's been pretty impressive. So this project If the Kickstarter wasn't proof enough it's certainly proof in the fact that the Activity in the forums and number of people downloading is especially because it goes right over the top So if your aria citrix zen server user it goes right over the top and brings in all your settings. So this becomes very turnkey to Deploy and replace and it's been a great project Now they have a couple slides on their website to compare xcp and g versus vmware And the reason to compare it to vmware is because as far as features go picture xcp and g is the full featured citrix Version so but a lot of companies in the enterprise market as we know vmware is the big guy on campus here So vmware is supports web councilman's basic vm live vm migration live vdi migration high availability xcp and g supports all of these except for the web council which is actually done by zen orchestra We're going to talk about that more later But zen orchestra is a vm that you can run within xcp and g and that gives you the web interface To manage all the systems and we'll like so we'll be covering that now a few more comparisons Council view you get that on all of them xcp and g with via their zen center tools and orchestra has it Hyper conversions. They have v sand xo sand. I believe xo sand is a licensed Add on all together. It's a separate product outside of this. So xo sand goes in on top of zen orchestra again Tool updates that's all supported automatic updates. You can do that through zen orchestra Which is kind of cool. So you can automatically patch the servers and update to the latest version Once again, it's using yum in the background there. Thin provisioning is supported on both of these Both vmware and xcp and g now added enhanced features are also docker now The docker i'm not much of an expert on it's not my core Function that I do so I can't speak a lot to actually managing it, but there are people who are using docker They're based around core os. So if you load core os load docker It can be managed on xcp and g server with zen orchestra And it does support things like some of the cloud init settings and cloud convicts me push to it I'm not an expert on this. I'm not going to spend much time on it But I do know it's supported and there is some documentation on that now. This is the zen hypervisor architecture So here's the hardware layer. So you have your your drive your network card your vga your hardware Your processor your memory and then you have everything in domain zero Which is frequently just called dom zero So the zen hypervisor loads and is a small piece on the hardware itself and then everything else becomes a dom zero Or dom you guessed So all the dom use are all the hosted Vms that are on top of it. You don't really want to load things here in domain zero Yes, you can hack away and load all kinds of things into it But ideally it's supposed to be kept very small very clean because it's just the basis that controls all the guests That are on top of it. And if you start loading things into dom zero, it is a standard linux You can get to the command line os but you want to be careful what you set up and Do on there because you don't want to have some instabilities at the base level Generally, you load everything as a guest because people have asked me can I load Zen orchestra you could load anything in here I don't really recommend it though because you end up with some weird issues because it's unexpected For the way the update process works. Everything's supposed to run as either as a Paravirtualization guest or a hardware virtualization guest now Paravirtualization versus full virtualization both are supported in zen server zen server Has been supported in the linux kernel since I believe version three So for a very long time and what this allows you to do is you can have windows and all your standard Full binary translation guest os is over here. So you can run bsd. You can run windows You can run everything else as a full virtualization you can run linux as full virtualization If you're looking for something lighter weight, you can have a pair virtualization Which means ring zero is still a zen but then ring one has a control plane that communicate in dom zero with the guest os So it's a lighter weight way to do deployments and they both are supported provided you have things configured properly but For those of you wondering about this it is built in And it is supported for both xcp ng and zen server is all part of the project As long as you're running similar when you run Paravirtualization you need to run a Host and guest os that have to have similar Kernels to be able to talk hence being built into the linux kernel now. Let's talk about a zen server host So we have the host itself and then we have local storage iso storage directed hatch storage One single host can completely run autonomously and run all of your Systems your vms and everything on a local storage pool So it does not have to have any other resources You can have a booted and have a raid array inside of it either software raid, which is supported in xcp ng server Or however, you want to configure your storage or direct attach storage such as ice because your nfs are both supported But when you want to pool resources together, you need two or more now the way it's Termed a lot of times it's always considered a pool even if there's only one Do you just only have one host in a pool? But as you add more hosts in a pool you may not want to use the local storage in a pool You could use a shared storage and when you have three or more that's when you can get high availability so you put the vm the vdi on a Shared storage pool and then it can fail over to any one of these in here based on the parameters You set up for the high availability It also adds the availability to very fast instead of just zen motion where you're passing a vm between systems You can quickly start them and just move it over here So if the shared pool is here the vdi stays in the same place and you can just pass it to other servers This makes it really convenient when you want to update hosts You can do rolling updates by just shuffling all the vms over to other hosts when they're all in a shared pool They shuffle in a matter even on my uh slower systems I have that a little bit older less than 30 seconds to move a linux vm from one to the other provided that They both have a common shared storage pool now you can still do zen motion and move live vms between each other without them being in a resource pool So the zen motion this is um not with a shared resource pool This is when you want to one move an entire vhd to another zen server It can be in the same pool if you're moving between local storage It can be completely separate machines as long as they're networked in a way that they can talk to each other So zen motion allows you to take the virtual machine and go from one server to another in the same pool In a different pool or when you're migrating and building it from pool to pool There's a lot of different options there. Um, this is a citric slide because Just so you know the features that you find in citrics are pretty much imperative The difference is citric charge is a license fee for this versus xcp and g This is just a free feature that comes with it and full snapshotting is supported So there's a couple different ways snapshot. This snapshot is being done in zen orchestra So it allows you to create snapshots of the vms. So, you know a slice in time Both live or offline, however, they are and allow you to then download those snapshots Export them or create new vms from them and it supports advanced coalescing So zen server inclusibility to collapse vdi chains to eliminate redundant nodes that result from the creation deletion snapshots This process knows coalescing and occurs in a background process and it's kind of Interesting how it does it and from the surface you see things happening very fast in a background They can coalesce back into each other So you can immediately get the result you want of forking a vm and starting it and then it will take care of in the background As needed the coalescing of all the data back either merging it back into one vdi file or Keeping those all separate because you've spun different vms up off of snapshots now the install pretty straightforward grab the iso You can use dd or whatever tool you want to use like etcher and all these other ones out there to Copy it to a thumb drive and make it bootable or an iso if you want to boot it off of a cd If you still have one of those they also have a net install option That's a little bit thinner and it will grab sources and download them But the download is not very big anyways Then the web ui now this is kind of neat This is the zen orchestra zen orchestra runs as a vm on top And it's the web ui to manage one or many Zen servers, so you only ever have to load one instance of this vm and you can manage Hundreds or thousands. I don't know what the upper limit is you can manage a whole lot of zen servers with one web interface And time all together we're going to cover that details of that later And they have a really quick deploy because of the power of the command line because each one is a linux Each zen server as you load it is running linux You can just run this bash command curl and it grabs a deployment tool that scripts the downloading and setting up of the vm It's a easy way to do it. Um, of course If you're an administrator, you always know the dangers of grabbing and pulling things just off the internet That execute at root level, but that's a whole different topic On the installer looks like any other windows installer choose language Choose the hard drive and this is one of the ways they depart it again on the installer from the folks over at citrix Because now they added raid support in here It's after a raid because maybe you want your boot device to be Rated together now when you're setting up zen server does not require a large boot device So you may want to use just a small couple SSDs it doesn't really have to be anything incredibly good other than solid for Reliability, but you also may want to mirror it that way your boot device isn't the weak point in here That way you can separate out the drives that are for your boot device and versus your raid And you can load this on thumb drives or whichever method you want However works for you, but it does support rating them together So at least you have some mirrored on there or if you have a server that supports hardware raid You could do it that way and just present the hard drive to Zen server for the install now first you have the Raid setup and we chose raid on this option But once you have it installed the second part is it uses the rest of the hard drive Uh, you can set up for either lvm or ext for file formats for thick provisioning or thin provisioning Set your network settings automatic through dhcp or static address or vlan Supported right out of the box through the installer and when you have it all installed This is the end result of what it looks like. There's a handful of things you can do on here It's menu driven network management interface authentication virtual machine. You can start and stop them Show the repositories resource pool configuration whether you want to join or leave a resource pool So from the command line, you can get a few things done here. It's not real extensive Well from this menu driven display what is extensive is the actual command line So if you wanted to completely Manage this from the command line or script this and this is how places like amazon are handling it There are a ton of utilities all from the command line that handles all the vm So they can be mismatched and moved and destroyed and added and modified all from the command line And then you can of course script this into a series of bash scripts to do things for you. So very flexible There's some github scripts out there For doing all kinds and behind the scene stuff We're mostly going to talk about using the interface on top of here as cool as all this is This is the very advanced way to do this. Um, and if you're building this, of course For something like a large scale deployment like amazon or any larger Hosting company may do You may want to write your own scripts for stuff, but it's option. It's there. I just want to point that out Then we have zen top is one of the neat utilities. I figured out to show you real quick So you can do some diagnosing and look at vm usage and things like that You can do this off from the command line. So it is kind of novel I do like all the power that they leave you with the command line So if you have some advanced use cases or scripting You want to do that is ability to do that and you know, see how things are going You can't operate this this way most people are going to choose either zen orchestra Or we're going to start with zen center. Now my first gripe about zen center is it runs in windows I know they're trying to uh, I think there's some people working and porting it over and getting it working in wine I haven't tested or really followed up on that because I use zen orchestra for all of my management of my zen servers So the xcp ng center is pretty full featured for managing zen server I don't have these in a pool So they show up too separate if you join them all into a resource pool that's supported Then all these storage become shared between them as long as it's a shared ability to share storage resource Such as nfs or ice cozy, but we're going to cover this as separate storage pools for this demo Here you can see the server itself Server uptime two days 20 hours a manager interfaces all in just class will expand what goes into and digs through all the details on there You can see all the memory usage between all the vms. Like so we're looking at this from the high level of the Individuals and server itself It also has the ability to Edit memory on the fly and it will automatically restart the vm as needed to change the amount of memory you have allocated But it also provides you have the zen tools loaded which come free with this on the on an iso that you can load into the vm Um, you can do a minimum maximum memory and what that does is allows you to over allocate memory So if you set up for 768, but it only needs 512 When it's only using 512 it can then allocate that back into the pool You can get in trouble over allocating memory, but it's cool. It's there Now there's networking versus nick and what the nick start is the physical part networking is the software layer of this Where you can create vlands you can create what I have here So it says lan of zen tom's lan of zen You notice how it's not tied to a nick these first couple of them here What that means is I can create virtual networks attach them to the machines But they don't exist outside of the pool outside of this particular server And this allows you to create two vms on the same machine and create like a bridge between them So I would take a for example when I do my firewall demos I will create the lan of the firewall tie it to the land Then I'll create the land of the firewall and tie it to a host only adapter and then tie other virtual machines So that same named like lan of zen host only adapter by doing that This allows me to have an independent internal only network that doesn't access Via any of the physical network cards and share resources within there great for doing Lab tests or demo tests or when you're taking stuff apart because you want to understand how something works And you don't want any outside network interference And you want to pass all through a specific firewall with no noise on the line. These are neat ways you can do that It also has a down here at the bottom. This is where you set your management and storage nicks So I have some 10 gig cards in my machine And that's how it attaches to a network I called storage 10 gig And then you can assign the IP addresses and everything else from here So these are the same ones you can control from the original when you load it So you set where the management is you set where the zen server Storage devices are and that's separate because these are not part of what shows up to the vms Now this auto yes and no our options that we'll cover later by just want to point them out here These are the automatic when you're creating a vm. It just automatically adds those to it Now here is the nick one four five. It's kind of looks out of order because we have them set up This is showing the physical side of the networks So I tie them together when I create the networking Together I tie it to these physical network cards just listing listing here what PCI bus pet there It also has fiber channel capabilities This is a sensor because I don't have a fiber channel in my system It also supports sr-iov if you're not familiar with that It's a way to pass the network card Through the PCI bus to the individual VMs none of the cards I have currently have that support But it is a feature built into zen server. Here's the council once again I'm looking at the same council that you would see if you were at the machine plugged into the vga cable itself VGH you may however you're hooking up to the machine when you're looking at the top level view Here's the performance meter so we can look at it. We can see all the cpu usage that's going on And how it's spiking and how it's working Then we have here Debian 9 demo, which is one of the VMs that's running under here So general kind of looks the same as they did here So the menus kind of repeat themselves memory storage networking But it's focused down to only this VM So I can look at the council for this particular VM because it has the tools loaded It's aware that ssh is on the server and it hits the option to launch ssh because it's in windows it automatically launches putty Here's what a windows server and the looks like here It's got the option to turn on remote desktop if it recognizes that rdp is enabled on that particular server So you can just open up into standard rdp session launched from windows or you can use it from the council here And I was just doing some rewrite tests in here passing hard drives through sequential write tests It's actually writes pretty fast I haven't really had any performance issues with this because I don't have a ton of detail when it comes to performance testing But it does seem to perform very very fast For all the VMs that we have running on here and between the hard drives and everything else And you can always look at what is chewing it up So we looked at the high view here of the virtualization server itself This is the individual VM and what processors this VM is using or hard drive or memory or Network performance that is running and you can then see the VM life cycle reports And this zoom allows me to zoom out between different time frames when I'm looking at this Here's what the snapshotting looks like inside of here, and I like the way they do this for forking So what I mean by forking is you can have it here how it's running now roll back to this snapshot And roll back to either one in either way so you're creating paths essentially So you're not just snapshotting it you roll back to another snapshot, but then snapshot again It'll track all that and fork all these out as it does it so it's kind of neat Um, it also supports reverting the snapshot new VM from snapshot save as a template If you have the VM set up perfectly like this is the perfect VM I want to build it as a template you can just build this as a template that way you can redeploy it when you're deploying VMs they deployed from this template that I made so I do this when I have my Debian 9 demo We have it all configured the way we want like with the general tools that I want set up So I don't have to go through trouble reloading it And you can build that as a template as opposed to loading it from an ISO each time when you create VMs And when you change views here, I move to object view versus infrastructure view There's actually search functions And I just don't have that many VMs to make it look really cool But some of the people running this in production have like over a thousand VMs running Being able to search create tag searches and Tag all these VMs with descriptions you can then go through and find and save all these searches So it will display everything out. Um, it's also telling you when the xcp and g tools are not installed I don't have installed on my free pb xbox. I keep it just kind of light without them It works fine if you don't install the tools But it just lets you know when you're going through here because it can't see inside of the drives So look at some of those details When you're creating a new vm if you have a template that you built It will show up in here with all the settings, but these other templates don't automatically load linux for you They have a whole lot of linux templates windows templates But it doesn't load windows for you still have to pop in the iso unless it's a template you built with a Storage piece attached to it So when you're going through and building your vms It's going to ask you for the installation media And this is back to if you remember when I said iso library is one of the storage resources Basically you point it out. These are an smb and nfs. However The external share or local It will pull from the drive inside of there So you can put a cd if you have a dvd drive in your zen server itself You can have the tools which is the guest iso tools you later And all the iso stuff is actually the name of my storage repository Where I have just a bunch of isos they pointed out there and you can even create a new iso library So you have to have it stored somewhere if samba share works perfectly fine And it just finds all the different isos you have on that share And allows them to be loaded into the virtual machine then cpu and memory We have the option for 24 vcpus for some reason it will let you over allocate more than you have that probably creates all kinds of problems I believe it gives you a warning when you do that Then topology 12 sockets with two cpu or pocket You can do like two sockets 12 of course for sockets or 12 sockets with two cores This sometimes comes down to the way you want your vm to see things or maybe a requirement for licensing You have with the vm you have running because some software licenses by socket versus by core storage by default Wants to just add to the default storage pool But you can add multiple virtual disks and whichever storage pool is attached to let you do it Whether it be a local one We have two different free nas servers we have attached to ours so we can choose either one One's just called free nas and one's called dozer virtual interfaces These are those auto ones by default it just auto adds these two But we can add more like the second land of zen and we can even force a mac address if we wanted in qos information here so if we wanted to Come up with you have a mac address already assigned because you have it in your dhcp pool You can do all that and generate those on in on here and put them in as opposed to letting it auto generate Now let's talk about zen orchestra now zen orchestra is same Developers that are making xcp ng server So this is a turnkey solution for zen server and xcp ng and they were like I said They built this and it worked with citrix and when citrix are changing things That's when they came up with the xcp ng and then loadings and orchestra on there They have a very similar model with all the source code is free for you to compile But if you want their pre compiled versions and support well, they have pricing for that So there's a few feature differences when you get the free version From them it auto updates and it's nice, but it does have a couple features missing Their pricing is pretty reasonable for paid support And like I said, you only need one instance of zen orchestra to manage many many Zen servers themselves now There's also if you just want to compile it yourself like I said for free you don't get any, you know Paid support, but you just want to compile it. I'll leave a link here to the zen orchestra installer updater It is a turnkey tool to take a vm that has just like a basic. I load it I do mind a devian so a basic devian load you run this and it deploys either a docker image or builds it and compiles it from the sources Which takes a little while depending on speed of your machine But we'll build zen orchestra for yourself So if you're doing this at home, you're playing with homelab, but you just want to try out all the features Before you buy it all you can download all the code and mess around and play with it yourself and compile it And this tool makes it handy now once you open up zen orchestra Because it's a web interface then you have to attach it It's not aware of that it's running in zen server So it doesn't auto-attach to anything you have to put in the password So zennifer zennifer two two separate servers I actually had a third demo server It's disconnected right now and you can just click connect and disconnect and add them remove them as needed Just type in ip address username password unauthorized certificate zen communicates over port 443 And by default has a self sign cert So you just check unsigned cert unless you've added your own cert That's a more advanced tutorial. We're not really going to cover all that today This will allow also the read only of zen servers. So you can actually attach one of them Any read only fashion that way you can't make any changes but could been pull all the information from there And like I said, you connect as many as you want in here So this one zen orchestra instance can control all your different zen servers provided It has the ability to talk to them over the network now once in here you have the ability to see All the zen servers it defaults to power state running These are all the different vms that are running inside of zen server And you have little mouseover options to start and stop them and you can click on each one and drill down into more detail So this pretty much all the features you've seen xcp Zen Center software is also available in zen orchestra for the most part their feature parody There's a few more advanced features We're going to cover here that zharka has on top of so it extends some capability But for the most part it has all the functionality you'll find inside of there That was in the zen center server we call zen center software we covered first So then we have filter options and I just changed to filtering none. So now we see even the non running ones It does support looking up the tags like lab test machines I have that tagged any vm both in zen center and in from the command line or from zen orchestra supports adding and removing tags from it It makes it easier to find things when you start having lots and lots of vms So you can hunt them down and figure out which one's which and the tags can also be used for functions I went ahead and chose like 8x Eight different vms here. So I just chose lab test machines and then from here I can go to these options up here One of them is migrate vms and this is just a quick way if I want to grab a bunch of them migrate them somewhere It's can migrate them between any zen server you have connected whether they're in a pool together or not It doesn't really care and this is kind of a nice thing. You don't really need to deal with any of the pools We're managing the pools Because you can just say each server is going to be individual as an orchestra or manage them I'm not using any shared storage between them and then you can do live motion and migrate these online offline between the different servers No problem at all and clone them and move them Now each server even though it's a loan is considered a pool. So it says there's two pools Even though there's two hosts To divide it out. There's only one host in each pool. There's 19 vms across Storage this is, you know, kind of a dashboard view now You don't get the fancy dashboard view when you have the non-compiled version. This is the version I compiled Versus their free version. You lose some of the stats pages and things like that inside of here But I wanted to cover that they had it here It's both in the paid version and the self-compiled version with no support And it reminds you when you do no compiling when you compile it yourself that there's no support over here Now let's take a look here at an individual server We can see that there's a patch needed because yes, it supports doing the patches right through the web interface Like so this makes it really handy and it works over low bandwidth, by the way So if you are you running zen orchestra and your zen server is somewhere else you can run this and it will communicate over um the internet to Zen orchestra to a uh further away one But of course you may not want to try and move vms across that because well that becomes a whole different issue But yes, it does work out of that but it does easily allow you to load patches on them as well This is an enhanced feature that zen orchestra supports With the xcp ng server you can see the stats pages the cpu usage memory usage network throughput Through throughput. I say that word wrong sometimes Load averages on the server You can look at the health of the server and what it does it shows you like the orphan vdis vdis attached to control of me What these are is for example If you started a snapshot you started the snapshot maybe it failed during the snapshot or You broke the vm or deleted the vm But not the snapshots that went with it You'll end up with orphan vdis and this can help you find them and clean them up Because they're just taking up space, but they're not attached to a vm anymore Or you can always reattach them But either way you could at least start finding them here when you're looking at the storage pools Then we have the w9 Demo one here and it's the same thing. We just like it was in zen center software. We can see the CPU usage memory usage network uh distro puts this is looking at individual vm versus the whole Server itself and the zen server This is what the console looks like so right here. We have the Same thing that we has actually same vm windows server 2016 You can view it here. This allows you to collapse and like give you more screen room. I believe it all runs in html 5 There's no plugins needed for it. It doesn't give any weird errors. I did all this using google chrome So you're able to get in here and control the windows Pretty easily or use the console on the uh if it's a linux vm This is where zen orchestra starts separating itself from The xcp zen center. So the zen center is nice But this is where the scripting comes in and where some of the automation tools come in is first in the jobs You can create Different jobs that control the xl server api And we'll show you here for example vm host storage vm migrate you can set up a job based on a time basis On a regular schedule to move a vm one way move a vm the other way Started stop it and script all of it all through here and a scheduling system It's very much like cron scheduling all done nice to a web interface So this is this is pretty handy and it's like I said It's also where this starts to separate itself and have more features than you're going to get with your xcp and g center Next one here is just the looking at the jobs. You can do things like host install patches as a job Maybe you don't want to auto install it. Maybe you do want to install it But then restart it later once again the jobs feature gives you that extended functionality to automate tasks that maybe You have to do on a regular basis on here. Now. This is another thing is the backup ng This is a feature I really like so they have backup and backup ng backup is the original backup they wrote and they still support it Um, so as you update zen server if you still have something custom in their original backup you can Or you can bring those backups into the backup ng Which is the new design of the backup server and I it works really really well It's what I've been using to back up all of our VMs now What's really nice about the way they design this is it does not use any weird storage formats You can restore them because they're xva files So they can just be re-imported into any zen server without zen orchestra You can actually just run input now It does have a backup and restore option we'll cover But it's not using any weird formats proprietary strange storage. It's just creating xva files And really nice for an end for doing it Now the first thing you do is you have to set up a remote file system for it because zen orchestra is running as a vm Unless you made that vm really big Um, and it may not be the most practical way to do it, but you could back up to itself Um, but that doesn't make a lot of sense So you could take the other vms and stick them inside of the zen orchestra vm by using the local storage that it has But like I said, that's probably not a great idea You can then other Storage systems that it has access to via the same network interface You can add like an nfs storage or a samba storage. So if you have a NAS box attached to it or a nfs file system, we use free nas so we can attach it via nfs It allows it to Mount that free nas because it has storage access to it And then it backs up the vm off of the zen server and on to one of our free nases that's not attached to the zen server Just for backups So it's where you set up the file some remotes But you could even attach it to a window server that you have an to be a samba It's got that as an option as well. Next we have the different backups You can just do rolling snapshots backup delta backup disaster recovery continuous replication Now the other nice thing is it supports more than one backup destination So you can add as many different places as you want So if you have four or five different places that you want to back up to all at the same time It will do that and simultaneously Do the backup pull the vm off create the x3 files and put them all the places you said to land it So I chose two here just for this demo, but it's you know, definitely kind of an option If you wanted to actually put the backups in more than one place This is a convenient way to do that. Now. What are the backup files look like? Let's actually talk about that So this is what it looks like when we do an xo vm backup These are uu id's of each of the vm's so it just saves the uu id out easy enough to get a List of all the uu id's for each vm there you can view them inside a zen server You can look at them in the zen center software You can do it from the command line and then it creates under the uu id the xva files So we have two backups that we do Every week we keep the previous weeks and this week's backups There's always two xva files and like I said, they're just pretty straightforward I can just import once I know what this vm is just re-import it And if I do import it without knowing what it is It'll give it the proper name and take care of that because it's embedded in the file And if we look at the json file that it creates that it Zen orchestra uses a json file in order to understand all the backup parameters and all the details of that particular backup That's where it's storing all that metadata Very easy readable no weird proprietary format and I can tell by looking at json file to look right here This is a free pbx so full backups or incremental backups both are supported Just so you know when you do full backup, it creates a full xva file our weekly backups We do a full xva, but during the week you may not want to dump all those data To it so you can do incrementals and sync on the deltas that is an option And it just kind of has an explainer and I can this is all on the zen orchestra site If you go through there go through their backup They have lots of cool explainers on how the backups work for the way it merges the blocks back for Rolling backups versus the incremental backups or it only keeps the last one Now the other option and this is something we're using is continuous replication and continuous replication is Backup but not to an xva file, but but to another Storage device so we have our free nas and we have the other free nas box called those are but these are storage pools Not target files, so it's not targeting like a nas box It is targeting it an existing are you can even include the local storage of a device So if you have two separate zen servers You can replicate to the storage pool on each of each other's Servers so what it does it creates the entire vm with all the metadata But in a non-running state and when you do it as continuous replication it does differentials So the we have it running in our system every half an hour We back up the vm to a local storage that way if our main shared storage ever went down We can quickly spin up our three critical vms No problem at all. So without having to deal with high availability or having more servers that we Don't really need for that because well, we're a tech shop and if a server stopped we look at why it stopped and could always just restart the Continuous replicated one and it would only be a half hour old It takes only seconds to do because it's only doing the differential changes Between that so it's a really nice feature that they have this built in and they have a whole explainer And how it works and I think I've covered the zen orchestra backup system in depth in another video Now this is what the restorer looks like so it recognizes The restorer the date I did the backup Where it's located which storage it's on and I can just hit restore now These are part of the full disaster carry backups and this is nice because I can quickly drop it somewhere or anywhere else So I didn't want to know what server it was on. It doesn't have to go back to the server It came from it can go back on another one. It can start the vm The restore is really easy to do we've tested it and used it As a matter of fact, I test it kind of regular Um, after we do a backup I'll grab at least one random vm because no backup is a backup unless it's been verified Uh, so we'll grab one and just restore it real quick. We'll shut it down after the backup restore it And okay, great works fine. We're good. We know the backups work We know the files are being backed up properly and can be restored because finding out you can't restore something is a pain They make it really easy because you just start on another server importing them. So zen supports XVA and OVA files XVA being the native zen format, but OVA being open Versalation format. So both these are supported in zen server and you can export everything from snapshots to All the different formats as an XVA file I don't know where OVA. I think you can export OVA file via the zen center software But then you can also import them back in here So if you just have those files like I had showed you and you copy them to something and something terrible happens Like an entire disaster in the data center, but you have a external you copied it to a External drive, which is something we do with ours. You could just grab these XVA files and import them here They can be done from the command line or they can literally just be pulled in and drop back in as restored as vm's now creating vm's on here is This part is pretty much the same as you've seen in zen center But it goes a step further If you go down to the advanced, this is where you can kind of Boot vm after creation auto power on change all these little options But then we have a multiple vm pattern So the name pattern here percent first index one last one six and it will create six of these vm's Either off templates or as you seen up there just like on the xcpng center You can do it off of a a template or an iso on there and it'll boot all these and send them all into Working so it's it's pretty cool that they got this built in so it allows you if you need to deploy like 20 Vms at once and I've done this for some load testing projects Just real quick. You just type in one type in 20 It would deploy 20 vm's uh that turn them on as long as the server can handle it. It'll turn them all on Oh, that was it for xcpng. Uh, check it out at xcpng.org. They have the forums on there Read through the forums if you're looking at this product You can just kind of look at the responses and you'll see that there's a lot of people using it There's a lot of great support a lot of people Sharing ideas on there and of course the development's all open source So you can go over to github and check out all the development and what's going on there I've been really happy with the project. They have not let me down the bugs have been really minimal If any it it's been Nothing I would worry about running a production. So yes We're using this in production for both us and our clients and many other people at much larger scales than I run This that have been using it. It's a great product And uh, I'm looking forward to all the new developments their roadmap is looking really bright This is november 2018. So everything I said is relevant as of now But of course with future versions of even more features to talk about maybe I'll update this slides. All right. Thanks Thanks for watching if you like this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details what you like and didn't like as well Because we love hearing a feedback or if you just want to say thanks Leave a comment If you want to know be notified of new videos as they come out Go ahead and hit the subscribe and the bell icon that lets youtube know that your interested notifications. 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