 XCPNG. There have been a lot of updates to this software since I first fell in love with it a while ago. I started with the Citrix, moved over to XCPNG when they launched their open source campaign and here they are you know almost a couple years later and it's just amazing the amount of development work and the features and the updates and the team has been super busy. When you look at their blog posts it's unbelievable. You look at here's you know release 538, 539, 540 and it's a lot of feature adding. They're not major changes that you're running a bunch of updates for that are painted about to do. It's real quality feature changes and additions. It's not a bunch of just quash and bugs so we can get another incremental update number and things like that including they are working on an entire version six of Zen Orchestra and we'll step back real quick here. What is Zen Project XCPNG server? The open source project and how it all works together. I have an entire video I did with a slide deck for those of you that want to do the deep dive into the history of the project how it came to be and everything else. I'll you know leave a link to that video if you're not familiar with it. The short of it is Zen server is the open source hypervisor then XCPNG is a compilation of that once again fully open source no gotchas full licenses well no licenses it's all open source so you get full features without a license I should say and then you have to sit on top of that again is the Zen Orchestra to orchestrate and manage and in our case here we have two pools three physical hosts 27 vms with four users which it has full user management everything else and 52 out of 80 CPUs being used right now with 10 running and 17 halted vms right now so you can kind of get the idea that there's a lot going on here and it gives you that ability to manage from one dashboard matter of fact when I've done all my lab work because this runs our infrastructure for a company in our lab I've shown how I can even tie together from this one dashboard more servers again to build another HA cluster that is still managed from one dashboard all right back to some of the updates so one of the things I want to talk about is they added advanced telemetry right here so if you look at the advanced live telemetry they put net data in there so this is the kind of basic one you get with Zen orchestra that to overview and go all right here's a CPU uses memory uses et cetera network throughput but that's obviously not as extensive as what you get when you go net data you can't just drop net data on there because net data well when net data came out and I've done reviews on this it's been around for a while but what I've done the reviews this was not a feature it did not have awareness of Zen server so bring us all the way to modern times and we have awareness built in that's because the dev team is well very good at development and they reached out to the net data team and got them to build in Zen awareness as a module so now it can understand the Zen servers and see the hypervisor right here's my lab server here's the domain control memory and here's another lab server running and it's great because they've integrated this in there so I can look at the individual usage and get these nice stats from that data within Zen server and I think this is a cool feature now they do have if you have the premium version of Zen orchestra which is the premium supported version they do have some integration to make it automatic so it wraps within side of Zen server but don't worry if you want to load it from the command line you're using the fully open source you know you're especially a lot of home users one of the things they get started with this is because there are no licenses it's a great way for them to start you just do I hit yum remove just to show the products that are listed but it's yum install these right here and this will integrate the net data system within there I believe you only need this one and then the UI is a wrapper that they added on to tighten the Zen orchestra but they are completely installed just from the command line and then you go to the IP address if you're not using the fully compiled version or of Zen if like using a free version of Zen orchestra you just go to the IP address of this of your primary server 199 and where you go with the standard net data port back to some of the other features now they have been working on inside of here refactoring some of the code for the of global private network this is a neat feature that I talked about in one of the last update videos I did on Zen orchestra and basically what this is is a way to create a private network as in you can put a firewall inside a year of Zen server and then have servers that sit behind that firewall but they're on their own private network that's not physically attached to an adapter but that happens only on a single host well there is of course open v-switch to allow that to spread across hosts but that's kind of older our system versus the way they're doing it now is creating GRE tunnels between them and that's actually a really cool feature because now you can build a firewall on one physical Zen server but then have the virtual machines running on another Zen server then create this GRE tunnel between these two devices to make that work that's really cool they're working on it and is it is if that's not enough they're working on Zen orchestra version six because they realize as the project is growing their customer base is growing and there's some large installs so they've been adapting Zen orchestra five to do some of these larger installs and right now like they said when it was originally designed in 2015 two to ten hosts and quite a few VMs now people have a lot more than that so they're building in and thinking about scalability so the project just keeps growing with you and I've been really happy with it and for those of you that are wondering this is one of the things that I've pointed out like how does the project get supported an open source project to me that is very mature that it has full support are the best ones because you know they're going to be around for a while they're very security conscious by the way there's been all the patches released and everything else for the xcp ng related to the latest round of Intel vulnerabilities they've been on top of all that but obviously that takes time and this is where the company is pretty cool because you go to xcpng.org and it's 100 for you no licensing but if you want to buy support just support they have that as an option and they have very public facing pricing when you go there which is something I really appreciate you didn't have to talk to a sales rep go through 20 cold calls and some type of BS webinar just to find out how much it costs to get to the thing they're very up front of hey you want six support tickets a year ssd support so if you want to buy it and the same thing with this is an orchestra product they have a monthly recurring fee if you want full support on their product or and I've covered this in my video and covered this in my breakdown of an orchestra you can compile it yourself because well it's open source and all the code is laid out for you and this gives you control over your infrastructure that's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of the project but because there's no gotchas it's all hey we sell support we have forums etc if you're a business by the support if you're a home user no problem tinker away poke at it have at it I've done ton of you know myself have done ton of tutorial to help the home users get started and learning about virtualization because it's a great platform to use and if you learn it all at home and then deploying your business it's the same software it's not a different version and it's highly affordable for a college kid learning to wanting to learn about virtualization at home you know someone who's just getting started because it's all free but I'll leave links to all this I just was you wanted to cover some of the updates of the project it they've been doing an amazing job the dev team is pretty awesome I've actually messaged some of them a few times they've always been quick to respond and they got comparisons of what it is and everything else is following up some of the stuff they have on here but I'm really happy at the project and I'm excited to see all the different developments that are happening the fact that they're working on a new version 6 on here and I'm going to be doing soon because now they're at the 8.0 version a video on that topic of how to get started with Zen server but it'll be the 8.0 edition because it's been neat seeing all the different enhancements and the support for things that I said they didn't have before so the only thing different between the video I'll do from previous to the one now is they have support for all these extra things that they didn't like now they support ZFS they support more file systems more features and they've increased many of the limits so if you were worried about limitations that it may have had prior they've increased like you know number of CPU limits and other enhancements that came with moving to the 8.0 version all right and thanks I'll leave links to all this and all of my other videos on this topic 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 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 like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our 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