Xen Orchestra 5.66

Let's start with our progress on XO Lite, then new features, improvements, and also asking you to help us to shape the future of XO. Don't miss our next live on Youtube and take a look on our 2021 retrospective. Grab a hot drink and enjoy the read ☕

✨ Xen Orchestra Lite

We've been working on the design of Xen Orchestra Lite (read this blog post if you forgot what it is). In a nutshell, this will be the default simple web UI when connecting on your host. It's not meant to replace Xen Orchestra, as it will be only "local" (for your pool) and non-persistent.

Thanks to our new UX designer, Clémence, we've established our first mock-ups. Take a look:

We'll share more in 2022 and obviously, we'll need you to get your feedback on our prototypes!

🆕 New features and improvements

S3 backup lands to stable

Thanks to some feedback from the user community, we have been able to fix some final things in our S3-capable backup storage. S3 backup will land, this month, in the stable branch of Xen Orchestra and therefore be available for everyone.

S3 compression

While the main S3 backup feature is now available for production environments in the stable release branch, we are still improving the solution.

This month, we are introducing compression in S3 backups. It's active per default on latest, it uses the Brotli compression algorithm and it should (hopefully) save you some space in your S3 storage. During our tests, we saw size reduction going from 30% to 60% depending on the VMs we were backing up. However, note that this could vary a lot depending on your data.

Ability to set suspend SR

To make the snapshot with RAM more accessible and easier to configure, we exposed in XOA the ability to set the suspend SR (where suspended VMs RAM is stored):

We found that snapshots with memory were used in various cybersecurity related investigations: it's very handy to inspect the memory after you've been hit by an attack (or thinking you could have). It might also help to find valuable information on the attacker, keys and all objects in memory. Being able to customize what SR this RAM image is stored on should allow even more flexibility.

Warning when default SR is not shared on multiple hosts pools

When you configure a default SR in a pool, all hosts in that pool must have access to that SR in order to work properly.

To avoid issues in your infrastructure, we decided to add a warning in the Dashboard/Health view that detects default SRs that are not shared on multiple hosts in a pool.

Disable HA during rolling pool update

When doing rolling pool updates, you need to be sure that HA is disabled to avoid issues: indeed, it's normal to restart the master host first, without promoting any slave to master while it's rebooted. Until now, disabling HA was a manual action that you had to perform on your side before actually running a pool update.

It is now a fully automated process which is part of the rolling pool update feature!

📅 Events and community

We are going live on YouTube

To celebrate the coming new year, we decided to try something new!

We will gather some of our team members and host a livestream on Youtube on January 18th, 3PM CET.

During this livestream, we will review the year 2021, the major projects we have started and those to come in the near future. It will also be an opportunity to ask your questions directly to our team. So we are waiting for you on our Youtube channel on January 18th!

We need your feedback

We want to involve our community as early as possible in the process of designing and creating the new XO6 UI, look, and functionality.

That's why we need you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your infrastructure. Note that this questionnaire is only the first step in our community involvement process, if you want to be involved in several stages of Xen Orchestra 6 development, start by completing this questionnaire.

If you don't see the button on the right side, here is the direct link to the form

Our support platform is evolving

As you know, our core business, before providing a software solution, is to offer an outstanding user experience. At the heart of this experience is the quality of our support, provided directly by a team of developers who are experts in the technologies we use.

In an effort to provide an ever-improving support experience, we have recently changed our platform. This new support platform will allow us to better process your tickets, ensure better follow-up, but also offer greater comfort to users.

In particular, this new support platform allows users to create an organization and thus allow several different accounts to access support in this way. A highly requested feature!

We updated our knowledge base consequently:

Vates Knowledge Base - Open a support ticket

Open a support ticket

🏢 Vates in 2021

And to finish this year, here is a recap on what happened for Vates in 2021!