Xen Orchestra 5.16

First release of the year. And it's already awesome!

Side news: guess what? XCP-ng, the free/libre alternative to XenServer is now on Kickstarter! Read more on the XCP-ng blog post.

Performance alert plugin

Keep an eye on your infrastructure usage: set CPU or memory limits for your hosts or your VMs, and never stay in the dark on what's happening.

And as usual, it's pretty easy to configure!

Read more about this feature in our dedicated blog post: monitor your XenServer with performance alert plugin!

Self-service usage

A user of a self-service is now able to see more data on its own usage. Very useful for your dev teams, or your customers!

Quotas

The user is able to see it's quota more easily: no need to create a new VM to see it, the use just has to be into "Dashboard" view to see it:

Visualizations

But this is also the opportunity to let your users explore their resource usage in depth. Indeed, we added visualizations and stats tabs:

Add virtual interface

A self-user can add a new network interface itself, only on the authorized networks:

Add an existing VM into a self

It's been a while people asked for that :) An admin can add an existing VM into a self-service, refreshing the quota to reflect the new usage resources!

Health view per pool

As an admin, your whole XenServer health infrastructure is displayed, in the current dashboard/health view. We added a select if you want to narrow numbers on one specific pool. Or even on multiple pools at once (excluding maybe dev infrastructure!). Here is a result for a specific test pool:

Ghost tasks fixed

This one is really a GREAT step forward in XO: for a long time ago, we had an issue of ghost tasks. Basically, this is an issue on how XenServer API is handling task object. If you restart the toolstack, we never get the message that tasks were destroyed. So we kept them, despite they aren't here anymore.

Frankly, we aren't able to find a net solution for this. Until we had a discussion with a XAPI engineer (thank you Jon Ludlam ;) ) about a undocumented field, giving the number of objects of each class everytime. This allowed us to make cache invalidation: if you task number is not the same than XenServer pool, we'll decide to remove our "local" tasks and re-fecth the remote ones.

And that's it! Say goodbye to ghost tasks!

Autopatching skips 7.3

You probably know that XenServer 7.3 removed a lot of free features. And this latest XS release is also distributed as a patch. Because we recommend to patch from the pool view of XO, this also installed the 7.3 "patch", finally updating your 7.2 to 7.3.

And this is probably something you didn't want. Right now, you can install all pool patches without fear of being updated to 7.3, because we simply skip the patch!

News on backup front

We are still improving multiple things related to backup:

• better concurrency
• more live reports on what's going on
• enhanced capabilities (multi-remote…)
• and so on (more details here)

If you want to test our improved concurrency algorithm, please comment, we'll give you a version of xo-server with it!