 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about hypervisors. Specifically XCPNG as it compares to some other options. Now, if you're interested in hiring us, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you're interested in furthering discussion on some topics, head over to forums.LauranceSystems.com, where I pretty much daily am in there in the forums replying and having fun talks about tech topics. Now, XCPNG has been around not as long as some of the other hypervisors, but its core has. And that is the Zen server in the background. So it is based on the Zen hypervisor, and then so is Citrix. Citrix, well, still is based on Zen hypervisor, and much of Amazon still is based on the Zen hypervisor. Now, this open source project, like I said, had been around a while, and Citrix took it and put their spin on it. So they created the Citrix Zen server. Then Citrix made a decision to change the license fees pretty much substantially on what they called an update. So you updated the system and suddenly you lost features, and they're like, yeah, the features you used to have in that last version are missing out on a new version unless you have license fees. Now, I have an entire detailed history, and I won't go into it right now, but I'll leave a link to the video I did where it breaks down the history of Zen server and XCPNG and how they came to be. It started as a Kickstarter campaign, and they decided to make the entire system open source. And companies are really embracing open source. I would say it's not like I would say any one particular year is the year that open source took over. It has been a slow, methodical growth, and a lot of it is because of companies misbehaving with licensing fees and people realizing that the critical infrastructure of their business is held ransom, so to speak, by arbitrary changes in the company going, if we charge more money, we'll make more money. That seems like a good strategy. So let's just charge more with, by the way, we're also going to remove some features, and we're not going to listen to you as a customer and your infrastructure is based on this, so you don't have any choice to pay. Spin it around, you look at a lot of the open source models where you get all the software for free, but then you're going, but how is someone going to support this software? Well, that's the open source model that, to me, works really, really well. And if you don't believe me, look at Red Hat. They were just acquired not that long ago by IBM in 30 plus billion dollar acquisition, and for a company that gives away software, it's something to think about, and they just sell support. And that's how XCPNG works. So let's talk about what it is and what it's not. What it's not is a partially open source solution. It is a fully, 100% free, costume nothing and licenses solution. And I think that's really important. That way, when you're setting these up, you don't have any worries about that. You're going, okay, I can just get the software, but of course that other big dirty word is, do we get support? Is this, you know, if I get it, well, what happens if there's a problem? What will I do? Well, between the forums and everything, if you're a home user, it's amazing the level of support that's offered for free. But I will cover this right up front, that they sell two different things. They have a whole support agreement here for their tickets and everything else, which, look, I didn't even have to call anyone. I have the price posted right here as of January of 2020, that it's $600 per host per year, which gives you six support tickets, SSH Pro support, one business response time, or $1,200 per host per year for unlimited support tickets, SSH Pro support, one hour response time on critical issues, initial setup assistance, et cetera. And this is one of the things I like about them right away. Now, I have this pulled up as well. This is the coordination tool, Zen Orchestra, that allows you to orchestrate with XCPNG. I look at them as one and the same. They are the same developers that run both sides of this. They sell the XCPNG, or I say, not sell, sell support for it, but give away the code and do all the development. And they also have all the open source for the Zen Orchestra. And that is the orchestrating tool by which you can manage it. And I'm going to show a little bit of this real quick in a second here. But this is really turnkey. And this is an important piece of it. So you have the hardware, you have the Zen server, then you have the management platform XOA. You can manage Zen server one of two ways, well, one of three, actually. You can do completely do it from the command line and script it. You can use a Windows-based management tool. That's free to download that they have. Or you can use Zen Orchestra, which is an entire web interface. Now, some people don't like the fact that Zen server itself, like the XCPNG tool, doesn't have a web interface itself at all. But I'm actually fine with this. And the reason why is because this allows you kind of a one to many relationship. So Zen Orchestra can connect to many, many Zen servers. And then you can coordinate separate pools of Zen servers and manage them all through one web interface that lets you consolidate them. And we have clients that are doing this. We have clients with data centers and they manage each stack, each group of hosts in Zen Orchestra. And then they have several groups of hosts which are referred to as pools in the Zen system. So one Zen Orchestra can manage many, many pools with one install in one instance. And it can do this over the web interface, even has the ability to do this across a VPN, if need be. There's all kinds of different use cases you can use for it. Won't dive too much into it. I have plenty of videos on how that works. But the other thing that's really nice, is the penetration of management, backup and disaster recovery and cloud enabler. Now the backup and disaster recovery is an important thing because a lot of people say, well, how do you back up Zen server? What do you buy this third party utility? And a lot of companies that make hypervisors, they have relied not only on selling you a hypervisor, but then rely on another third party company to sell you a backup solution. They have a full backup disaster recovery solution that allows you to back these machines up, back up them to standard open virtualization formats. Actually, you can export these in and out. You can save them to external drives. You can then figure out how to drop them over on whatever cloud external provider you want without a problem at all. This is a really nice feature. When you look at it compared to some of the other systems, because this gives you turnkey between running Zen Orchestra and the XEP and GPRO. Now you're probably thinking Zen Orchestra costs money, but like I said, there is a fee if you want the full system. So if we go to Zen Orchestra and we go to pricing, free. You can play with the free version. You can order $77 a month enterprise to 20 a month and you get the full auto patching, rolling snapshots, full backups, backup reports, remote assistance, all this if you want the paid support. If you're a home user, you can try the free one or you can even grab all the source code. They have an entire guide on this that lets you grab the source code and compile it yourself and you completely will be able to do all the features. They don't hide anything. It's all there if you compile from source. I have a few videos on that. So that encourages home users to do this. So once again, you're not locked into a license fee. These are support fees and that makes it a really good choice. This is one of the reasons I like ZenServe so much. Now let's go back over here and talk about some comparisons here. So let's scroll down and XEP and G versus ZenServe are free and XEP XO versus VMware. This is a couple of the comparisons are going to be one. Why would you use this over Citrix? Well, the license fees at Citrix are ridiculous and confusing and I'm not sure why Citrix does some of the things they do but that's fine. Good news is if you are a Citrix user, you can install this right over the top and import all your stuff without a problem at all. There's 100% compatibility because they're all running in ZenServe and we've done this for a few, well, more and more clients all the time. We've installed over the top of a Citrix install and everything brought right over into XEP and G. I still recommend backing up first because things can go wrong but it does work. So here's all the features and I'm not going to read through every little piece but a couple of the people asked me commercial feature-wise, it does have SRIOV networking and it does support GPU pass-through with high-end graphics cards like some of your high-end Tesla ones and things like that. If you're a person who want to build your home lab and you want to talk about GPU pass-through, you probably are talking about more of a consumer-grade system. You can do that from the command line. It's not exactly exposed in the full system. So it does exist. It is a possibility to do it but it's not exposed to the web interface in there. So let's also talk about directly with VMware and a nice little chart they have here. I'll leave links to all this. This is all the stuff, images and assets posted on our website. So when you look at the two together, and like I said, I combine these into one but they do separate out because it's delegating where the functions are. Web console for VM management, basic VM admin, live VM migration, live VDI migration. High availability. I've even done videos on each one of these topics of we even moved a phone server with active phone calls on to show the V, live VDI migration between servers is, you know, as smooth as it is on other platforms and I can not drop a phone call when I do it. So I have videos on each of these topics. You do have a console view, hyperconverged solution. Now I touched on this briefly. I'm not going to dive into it in this particular but they have Exosan and Vsan are the two different hyperconverged solutions for some of the storage. So that does exist in there. A little bit more enterprise level but it does go to that scale of enterprise level. Tool updates, automatic updates. This is kind of cool. When you have the foals and orchestra, when you compile it yourself, you're going to update yourself but if you pay for it, that's one of the things you get is the full service in terms of they do all the updating for you. That's what you're paying for is that automation level. Thin provisioning is supported on both platforms. Health checks, role-based administration, ACLs, single sign-on, self-service, scheduled tasks. You can schedule the moving, starting, stopping of VMs. There's a lot. As a matter of fact, because this is all written, it's all Linux on the back end with a really nice web interface in the front end, you can do things from the command line and integrate them into cron jobs or you can create in the interface an entire schedule to do things including not just that high availability but load balancing when a server becomes under too much load. You can then tell it under those circumstances move those VMs to a server that has less load. That's completely supported in the all free version by the way here. None of these are paid things you get. Basic backup. Now the backups are really extensive in here. This is one of the things I like to touch on. So yes, you can do a basic backup but if you want to do delta backups, that's completely a possibility. File level restore is actually a pretty cool feature where you have it configured properly. You can not just grab that old VM. You can pull a file out of one of the old VMs without having to do a full VM restore. It'll let you do that. Continuous replication and of course the load balancing like I had mentioned. So file level restore and delta backups are great because if you're going, well, I want to snapshot my VM but there's only so many megabytes available for me to upload this and how do we do that if you're saying it's an integrated backup solution? Delta backups, you're only synchronizing the changes. So once you do that initial VM upload and you backup the directory where the deltas are created, no problem. It's a very small matter of fact. They're so small and so fast we use delta backups to hourly backup all of our machines here at the office and all the virtual stacks we run and we set this up for clients as well. It's a really nice solution so you can keep a lot of iterations without going through and having an entire, you know, separate backups and separate tools and separate licensing, et cetera. It's all done through one single pane of glass. Now, the last thing I'll cover a little bit is I'm going to talk about the Web interface on here and I'm going to open up both versions just to show you they're the same. The one I compiled from open source and the one that we have for that was the paid premium. So, right here is the open paid premium, sorry, paid premium one. It's completely up to date. I can go over here. I can set up jobs, backups, all the features, blah, blah, blah. Everything's in here. I can import a VM, import a disk, create new storage, et cetera. We go over here. Matter of fact, well, something a few people have asked me for and it even has the whole hub. They've got templates in here and things like that to start even loading. You want to load PFSense in here. Click install. It'll grab and download and install it. WN10, CentOS. They've got a lot of cool integration plus you can import standard formats. You come over here to the compiled one that is 100% open source. Here's all the features and here's all them working. The only thing that's missing right now, I never compiled the hub features in because you do have to pull some of those in, but I still have the new VM storage. I can still import VMs. I can go over here to the backups. You can see stuff working. You can see the delta backups that I can do. This one failed for a reason. It's got a whole notification system in here for when it failed. This is something I did when I was moving a server. It's all in here and works perfectly fine. I do this to show that without any license fees all this will completely work. But because I like to pay support, we encourage our clients that we set these up for. They frequently want to buy support packages. We do encourage them to buy, especially when you talk about a host support package at like $600 a year. That is so inexpensive compared to the cost of a lot of other hypervisors. The last little thing I'll cover here, right here is a lab server and we even have one of our other demo servers when we set them up. You can just go in here inside of XTPNG, connect to the lab server, and now we go over here to the hosts and now I've connected more hosts. This is that idea of from one control plane I can manage many hosts. These two servers are in a host I call the puddle because it's a pool and there's only two of them. That's my silliness anyways for those asking why I call it that. This is their lab server. We do more of our testing. Once again, this is just a standalone server that I can quickly attach and spin up here and then I can now from one control plane control all the VMs and without them being in the same pool I can even migrate VMs between any connected hosts. When you see the other hosts in here, for example, these initials represent a client server we set up on our network before it was deployed. We did all the migration form and did all the testing when we built their server. I did a review on that particular box. It's a DDEL server we loaded XTPNG on. We just attached them really quickly here to do all the testing setup, maybe move certain servers and build them on there as needed and then we deliver them to the clients. This is the nice thing about this and then if I connected over a VPN I can actually reconnect and orchestrate from here but generally our process is to install the XTPNG and Zen server directly on their machine so they have their own control plane and they have an internal IT department that's going to be managing it so they wanted control plane done internally but the possibilities are there. The power of it, it's a fully, like I said, open source which means you are not beholden. If they decide to, they're not going to change something on you like Citrix said, well, yeah, your license that we used to give you which Citrix had a free license, they changed the terms and conditions on you and removed features because they said, well, that's what it says in our license, we can do that. This is all done under full GPL. All these features if you wanted to compile yourself because you want nothing to do with that company you can do an external server and we're even running into some consulting work we've done with companies that do type of military work and one of the things I thought was really interesting is they just don't like the fact that so many things call out to licensing servers all the time that's kind of a, you know, something that bothers them a little bit, they're going, you know, our infrastructure is very dependent on these third-party companies who license and those activations constantly call out, it kind of makes us feel like we just don't own it all the time and in some ways they're kind of right they don't because if they don't renew the license they will expire and when you talk about something like ESXi it's not a bad platform it's been around for a while it's a very mature, well-developed product it has massive market saturation but it they charge dearly for it and I have, you know, I've had some people love it, some people hate it, some people have hated the problems they've had with it and tit for tat feature-wise XC PNG is not only ready for the enterprise it has been deployed in enterprise we have done consulting with so many companies that I cannot, there's not a lot of people who just close names but I have seen very large companies that are all using XC PNG for their systems. Frequently, almost every time we see it is because they are already familiar with the Centric Zen server market and they wanted to switch over to XC PNG because the same thing, they were angry at the license fees, they said the support was poor, the licensees were high and it's a bad combination for things especially when Citrix raise the fees and remove features and want even more fees for features they are used to having and not want to patch and upgrade. The folks over at XC PNG, you can hit their forums up, you can see that they are very actively developed and they've listened to the crowd there's been features finally added that people said, wow, I asked Citrix for this years ago, they never did it, XC PNG has built in many, many more features and you know, keep up with their blog you'll see they are adding a lot more things all the time including a lot of private networking and systems including the way to take servers that are maybe remote to each other and create GRE tunnels between them so you can have shared private networks between them, there's a whole other project they're doing to expand that capability for building out your infrastructure which once they, once they get the time to do that I'm going to do some videos on that topic as well so they've taken it and gone further than a lot of other things do and it's all integrated these aren't third party plugins, these are all integrations they have which back to the original thing I said they're all open sourced and license free so if you're a home user looking to start out on this I have a lot of getting started videos on this I'm going to do some new ones because we're at the version 8 my last ones are based on 7 but they've only added features, everything I said in my version 7 getting started video is still relevant so this is the reason why for people always ask why I use XCPNG why I like it, we've built a lot of our stuff on there, yes I've looked at some of the other ones the runner up for this is probably going to be because someone's going to ask would be Proxmox, I think it's a good solid system I don't feel I've seen any Proxmox systems that scale this way but Proxmox is still a great option I don't have anything that I would tell people to use it, we have clients that have it in their back end, I'm not the most familiar with it but they seem to really like it it's a solid platform as well so I'm not going to downplay the fact is but my choice is and for the consulting work we've done and the integrations we've done for some and seen some large systems where we've helped migrate you know P2V migrations we just did another one so we physically moved all the servers on there XCPNG has been my go-to it's been a really solid performer and having everything from backups, turnkey all built in to one system easy control plane makes my life really simple and that's one of the reasons we like it alright, 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 if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time