New features incoming

This week, we'll release interesting features in Xen Orchestra.

Pool master redirect

After a report from "msciciel" in our forum, we decided to implement a redirect mechanism: if you add a server and it's not the pool master, we automatically and seamlessly redirect connection to the actual master. It needs some adjustments in GUI (to tell the user that we are not connected to the slave but redirected to the master), but it works now.

We are currently working on a live pool master change without any hiccups. Believe us, it's not trivial when the XAPI simply closes the existing connection without any other clue of what's happening.

Event tracking

It's planned in our road map since the beginning, but now it's here! Xo-Server use the event system for the XAPI to refresh its data. What does it mean?

  • scalability: less calls to XAPI due to our cache system, allowing more XO clients without any pressure on your Xen infrastructure
  • resources friendly: no longer basic polling every 5 seconds: because we fetch everything everytime, it was "CPU/RAM/Bandwitdht/whatever" consuming. It might helps people using a LOT of VM's
  • faster refresh time: as we receive immediately events from XAPI, we removed the previous polling time. Thus, information from XAPI appears faster in your web GUI

We will push the code and a new XO Appliance with latest version updated this week (or week-end). We'll keep you in touch here.

What's next?

Next big steps are:

  1. VM creation, allowing XO cover basic XenCenter features
  2. GUI optimization with better classic views
  3. Events between Xo-Server and Xo-Web (reducing again the load for Xo-Server and the latency for Xo-Web)
  4. ACL's

We are open to any suggestions or questions: our forum is the best place for that.