Xen Orchestra 5.63

September release is now available. This release is focused on improving the overall user experience in Xen Orchestra. We also have part of our team still working on XO Lite.

Duplicated MAC adresses view improved

In the health view of Xen Orchestra, we display all VMs that have duplicated MAC adresses. While this is a very interesting feature to avoid conflict in your infrastructure, there are situations where duplication of MAC addresses is not problematic and sometimes even desired.

For example, if you are doing Continuous Replication jobs, it's highly possible that you will have some duplicated MAC adresses without it being an issue.

To improve the usability of our health view, we are now automatically hidding all VMs that have the start operation blocked - as they are likely to be related to CR. In addition, we also added a switch to allow you to hide all VMs with duplicated MAC adresses if they are shutdown.

Improved backup job edition

After editing a backup job, the user is automatically returned to the overview page. Until now this page was reset with no regard to search filters, forcing users to refilter the page according to their needs.
To improve the user experience, we are now keeping all filters active when you are going back on this page after a job edition.

In addition, we also moved the filter selector on the top of the page instead of the bottom as it's easier to use it from there and make more sense than having it on the bottom of the page.

Amazon S3 backup

This feature is one of the most expected by our users who want to make backup in the cloud.
A brand new developer (Florent) joined our development team last month specifically to work on the issues we encountered between our merge algorithm and the Amazon API.

Good news is that we are making progress - we changed a lot our architecture, especially the way we are handling backup storage and it should allow us to get better overall performances as well as better merge time.

This new architecture we are working on also allows us to think about future feature extension as compression and encryption, which was not possible before.

XO Lite - treeview

XO team is still working on the XO Lite project, and we started the work on the UI part.

This month, we are introducing the treeview! This treeview is very important for us because it will probably serve as a beta version of the one we will use in the future Xen Orchestra 6. Note this is very early design but this will give you an idea of it:

Beta - VHD Merge worker

Thanks to all the feedback we got from the first beta step, we changed the way to manage syncronisation between different instances using VHD Merge worker.

We are also working on the possibility to run Merge Worker on the remote to improve performances (for example, running our merge binary program on your NAS directly, to enjoy local performances).

Netbox plugin improvements

We are continuously working on improving our users experience in Xen Orchestra. This month, we worked on the Netbox plugin in particular.

Improved error message

We improve the way we handle error message in the Netbox plugin. In case you didn't configure properly the UUID in your netbox plugin, you will now have a clear message explaining you the configuration process you must follow.

Support nested IPs range

Nested IPs range are now handled correctly by our Netbox plugin. We compute automatically which IP is synchronized to which sub-IP range configured in Netbox, even if you have a nested ranges.