XO 5.x goals

Olivier Lambert

• 2 min read

Almost 2 years ago, we published a blog post about our objectives for Xen Orchestra 4.x branch. We made even more than we thought on it.

And now, it's time for our goals on the 5.x branch. It doesn't mean everything will be available at the 5.0, but like the 4.x, we'll release the following features step by step (except the new interface, which will be the starting point of 5.0)

New interface

You can read our introduction about it in this article, and our recent progress there.

Smart and flexible backup

Mainly 2 things:

  • be able to select specific disks to backup VMs, not all the disks (eg: not the big data disk if it's not relevant)
  • make a smart backup job, ie not specifiying VMs you want to backup, but some rules (all running VMs on some hosts, all VMs starting with "prod-*" etc) executed at the time of the scheduled operation.

We'll explain this further soon.

Cloud backup

Cloud backup will be a new option available for XOA users: you could make your backup into an online secured space we'll provide. This way, even if your whole infrastructure is destroyed, your data are still available off site.

Customized ACLs

Here, the idea is to allow admins to create custom ACLs roles to your users.

Advanced load balancing

We already started to provide VM load balancing, see:

The goal is to continue to improve the system, and if it's possible, to provide predictive possibilities (heuristics).

Report system

We already have everything we need, in terms of data. The thing now, is to generate reports and insights on your infrastructure usage. This is also something useful to compare the evolution of the use and what VMs are eating the most of your resources

A new appliance

We'll bring you a new XOA, this time using a recent version of Debian, using PVHVM and its performance boost. It will come with a way to transfer all your previous XOA configuration to the new one, in a very easy way.

Faster updater

Our new updater will be faster, but also less exposed to complicated network situations (transparent proxies and that kind of stuff).