curious i see all this talk of proxmox and kvm, wondering why nobody is using XCP-NG ofor VMs with management ui, or ven StarlingX for that matter. If your into kubernetes and working on k8s/virtualization.
I used the holy trinity of hypervisors including XCP-NG. Was happy with it until I had an issue with it, impossible to add any volume or create vm virtual disk for unknown reason. But I was happy with it. Preferred it over proxmox actually.
I prefer XCP-ng over Proxmox because my first professional work experience was as an intern at a company that used Citrix XenServer so all I know about hypervisors is rooted in that.
Same boat there. Years of Zen so I was happy at how similar they were. Although xcp-ng has been much more stable for me. Zen had weird network issues at my old job (but that was probably caused by our odd networking).
I had nothing but problems with xcp-ng. Networking never wanted to work quite right and when I did get it working it would break after a while. The UI is awesome. The clustering features are pretty intuitive.
Proxmox UI is also pretty intuitive but far from pretty. I use the hypervisor as a tool though so I don’t care about the looks. Proxmox has been super stable both clustered and unclustered across multiple sites for me. I’m very happy with it.
I am labbing both and right off the bat I have discovered issues I don’t like with xcp-ng such as locally hosted ISO library problems, dynamic memory and resizing VDIs requiring halting, defaulting to realtek nic instead of Intel nic, some random glitch that lost all network configs that apparently has existed since 7.x and required reloading the host.
Xcp is a lot stricter, for good or bad. For proxmox it’s fine to have networks on each host that looks roughly the same. For xcp, the network has to ne 1:1 equal to be in the same pool. This makes proxmox much easier to deal with administratively. But for xcp the upside is that there’s no guesswork involved, which is much more stable. Not that proxmox is unstable, but it’s not like it never crashes. I have yet to see xcp crash even once over several years I’ve messed with it.
Not that proxmox is unstable, but it’s not like it never crashes.
I’ve been running Proxmox for 10 years, only rebooting due to power outs or upgrades, with uptimes reaching 3 years. Never has it had as much as a hiccup.
That’s it true. You can have different networks in one pool. I have a Host with 4 NICs and a second with 2 just 2 NICs in one pool but you can’t move VMs between both hosts if your VM has a notiere attached that is not present at the second host.
I find Proxmox a lot easier to learn, you don’t need to worry about deploying a management interface and it has ZFS support.
You can use ZFS with XCP also. I was using it until recently when I went with NVME storage.
I’ve been using XCP-NG for years and love it. I have a cluster of three servers, multiple NICs including 10GB NICs and multiple VLANs. It’s been easy to configure and run.
I’ve configured multiple virtual networks, a PXE environment, multiple Kubernetes clusters, and more. I’ve never had so much as a hiccup from XCP-NG.
Highly recommend it.
I have used both a lot, and for overall admin I prefer Proxmox.
I have to say XCP really has some niceties to it. The whole thing felt much more snappy to manage VMs than with Proxmox, especially when stopping/starting them.
I wanted to like XCP-NG because it’s easy to use, but the limitation of 2 terabytes per VHD was the killer for me. I guess for most VMs you won’t need that much storage, but that was a deal breaker.
There may be some way to get around that limitation (which is an inherent issue with XCP-NGs storage stack) or use software RAID in an OS to create arrays of 2 TiB disks, but that’s a lot of effort for nothing.
In future you could give it another try they are currently reworking the whole storage API. Also the 2TB limit is the. Supposedly to drop.
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/09/23/zfs-ng-an-intro-on-smapiv3/
But as I said they still need time.
I use XCP-ng at home and work. Works great. XenOrchestra provides a great interface and built in backup solution. Not sure the issues others in this thread are mentioning but we’ve had almost no issues in the 6 or so years we’ve been using it.