Release

Xen Orchestra 5.68

Xen Orchestra 5.68 is now available. While our teams continue to work on the implementation of Xen Orchestra Lite, we are also making progress on projects that will come to fruition with the release of Xen Orchestra 6, such as the creation of a new public REST API.

Marc Pezin, Olivier Lambert

Feb 28, 2022 • 5 min read

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✨ XO Lite - one more glimpse

For some time, our team has been busy working on the interface of our new Xen Orchestra Lite. Here's a little preview of what's coming in the next few months. Clemence, our UX designer, will talk about it in a dedicated DevBlog coming soon.

Here are the new VM creation screens:

Default display for VM creation on XO Lite

🆕 Public API (alpha stage)

⚠️

This is an alpha feature that may change significantly in the coming months - do not use this feature in a production environment.

We originally developed our existing API to be used between the Web UI xo-web and the server backend, xo-server . That's why it's a JSON-RPC API connected via websockets, allowing us to update objects live in the browser. This is perfect for our usage, but a bit complicated for others.

Also, this API wasn't meant to be public, but over the years some users have expressed a desire to be able to use it for their own purpose. This led us to add more tooling around it, like xo-cli and to answer specific requests.

For those reasons, we decided to build a new API, not an evolution of the current one, but 100% new. It is meant to be public and REST-like. So a simple curl command can request it. We will also document it as the intended goal is to be public this time.

For this release, we have laid the foundations of what this future API will be. Although this is a very early version, you can already explore its first features and give us your feedback and expectations.

Principle and example

🔄

This is an example, and details might change fast. Please refer to the official documentation here.

In order to make the REST API available, you need to create a token, for now with xo-cli, but in the near future, directly in the web UI:

# xo-cli --createToken http://xoa.example.com myUser
Password: **********
Successfully logged with myUser
Authentication token created

0OQIKwb1WjeHtch25Ls

Now, you can use this token to perform calls with this REST API:

# curl -b authenticationToken=0OQIKwb1WjeHtch25Ls http://xoa.example.com/rest/v0/vms?fields=name_label,power_state
[
  {
    "name_label": "FreeNAS",
    "power_state": "Running",
    "href": "/rest/v0/vms/0fc14abc-ae7a-4209-79c4-d20ca1f0e567"
  },
  {
    "name_label": "Ubuntu 20.04 test",
    "power_state": "Halted",
    "href": "/rest/v0/vms/d505eb99-164e-5516-27e1-43837a01be45"
  },
  {
    "name_label": "Rocky Linux 8",
    "power_state": "Halted",
    "href": "/rest/v0/vms/38f423b7-1498-ee8c-ca8d-d3bb8fcffcf2"
  },
  {
    "name_label": "XOA 🎷",
    "power_state": "Running",
    "href": "/rest/v0/vms/857e34e5-c61a-f3f1-65e6-a7a9306b347b"
  }
]

☑️ SR creation improvements

When creating certain local SR formats, such as ext or LVM, the operation includes formatting the disk on which you are creating the SR.

To avoid unpleasant surprises for users who are not familiar with these types of storage, we have added a confirmation box that warns the user in this case.

⚕️ Health view - coalescing VDIs

The Health view of Xen Orchestra now includes a table that shows the number of VDIs currently needing to be coalesced in your infrastructure.

An additional alert will also be visible in the menu of your interface in case more than 10 VDIs require a coalesce on the same SR.

🐨

The need to coalesce virtual disks is normal and occurs when you delete snapshots from your VDIs (among other possible triggers, like backups which also utilize snapshots). The coalesce process usually takes care of these regularly. However if you have SR issues, the regular coalesce process can fail or fall behind, leading to many uncoalesced VDIs piling up. Now you will be able to see at a glance if this happens!

💽 Delta backup - select target SR for VDIs when restoring

⚠️

This feature only works for Delta Backups.

To give you more flexibility when restoring a backup, we have added the ability to choose the SR you want to target for each VDI you restore. So if a VM you'd like to restore had multiple disks, you can assign them to separate SRs while restoring!

In the future, we would like to develop this feature to also allow you to exclude certain VDIs when restoring a backup.

XCP-ng 8.2.1 is here

Today is a big day, as we're also announcing the general availability of XCP-ng 8.2.1. It's simply an update and it's available now (just update your XCP-ng hosts as usual). We also rebuilt a new ISO containing all updates since our initial LTS release.

If you want to learn more about it, visit our XCP-ng blog!

Kubernetes users: we need your feedback!

We'd like to learn more about your container usage, with Kubernetes or otherwise.

In fact, we'd like to know how we could improve our XCP-ng/XO platform so it's easier for you to deal with container orchestration and so on.

So if you already use XCP-ng and XO, and Kubernetes or containers in parallel, please tell us in this dedicated thread: