Release

Xen Orchestra 5.74

It's back to school time! We're happy to see you with a new release from Xen Orchestra. This month, we focused on backup and XO Lite, specifically on backup encryption.

Olivier Lambert, Marc Pezin

Aug 31, 2022 • 3 min read

🔒 Backup Encryption

Backup encryption is a long awaited feature, now made possible as we added a "block mode" to store your data. Initially, this "block mode" was created to work with any S3-capable software: however, it's also very flexible, allowing us to quickly add new features we couldn't with plain VHD files, like compression -enabled by default already-, encryption and even deduplication in the future.

⚠️

Backup encryption is currently in preview mode for people running on the "latest" XOA channel. You should NOT use it as the main source of backup for your infrastructure until it lands on "stable". Test it, but remember to use it at your own risk!

Anyway, it's now possible to create an encrypted backup repository in Xen Orchestra: this way, you can backup your VM data in any location, even untrustworthy ones, for example without physical access control, or a lack of secure network and so on.

How it works

When you create your encrypted backup repository, you'll be asked to enter a passphrase. This passphrase is used to encrypt your VM data, so don't lose it or don't forget it. The passphrase is obviously NOT stored on the backup repository, only in your XOA. In the near future, we are planning to implement the ability to store your passphrase directly on your Xen Orchestra account in order to allow a recovery mechanism even if you both remove your XOA and forgot the passphrase.

☝️

Backup encryption works at the backup repository level. You must create a new "remote" that will be encrypted. It's not possible for encrypted and non-encrypted data to coexist on the exact same backup repository.

🏁 XO Lite alpha one

We announced a few weeks ago that we were switching the framework used for the development of XO Lite in order to use VueJS. We are happy to announce that we have made great progress on our new implementation and we've already caught up to the React version we started last year. This new XO Lite version is available for you to try and we are really eager to get your feedback on it.

How to deploy XO Lite if you don't have it yet? Very easy:

wget https://lite.xen-orchestra.com/dist/ -O /opt/xensource/www/xolite.html

Then, pay a visit to your XCP-ng host with the URL:

https://<host_IP_address>/xolite.html

You should see that:

We are intending to update this version on a regular basis so you will be able to test all the new features coming in the next releases. Stay tuned!

💡

If you already had the React version deploy, just force refresh the page and you'll enjoy the new VueJS version!

🏷️ HA label added on SR

As a QoL feature, we added an HA label on SRs that are used for High Availability in your pool. This way, you can now see which SR you don't want to mess around too much with when working on your pool.

⚕️ Detect VDI with invalid parent VHD

We added a new view in the health dashboard: Unhealthy VDIs.

During various actions, such as snapshot creation for example, the XAPI creates VHD chains as a way to link disks one to another. Sometimes, some disks fail to be linked to its parents disks - which can be a sign of storage issues. This view should help you identify such problems before they trigger a bigger problem on your storage.

✏️ New graphic Identity

As you know, we recently reworked the graphic Identify of our company: Vates. In the interests of continuity, we also decided to rework the identities of our products in order to homogenize our overall brand identity.

Marc, our marketing manager wrote a complete blogpost on the topic, aiming to explain the context and motivation behind that big graphic rework. And yes, the new logos are displayed, so don't miss it 😮