8.2 to 8.3 XCP-ng upgrade local ZFS Issues

Software & Web Applications
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I saw XCP-ng 8.3 has entered LTS and seemed like a good time to upgrade my homelab before upgrading production in business’. I currently use local ZFS on a single server for my SR and if you are thinking about upgrading there some extra steps to get this going if you environment is like mine.

In a terminal on your host do the following:

  1. Reinstall ZFS yum install zfs then modprobe -v zfs to load the kernel module.
  2. Re-import the pool zfs import to find the pool name then zfs import <insert pool name>
  3. Reboot

Hope this helps someone avoid a bad time. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Any gotchas if all your storage is either lvm local or nfs/smb network storage? The only one I know of is that you can not go from 8.2 on BIOS boot to 8.3 on UEFI. Still thinking about ways to solve that (see below or it would be possible).

I need to get my production moved over and my lab (that other employees think is worthless) is down until a new room is built.

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I can’t say much on the nfs/SMB SR as I am not using that. I agree with you on the BIOS and uefi. Although it did allow me to upgrade my 8.2 BIOS to 8.3 BIOS. I got a big warning about upgrades not supporting BIOS going forward.

If this was a production environment I would install it properly and use uefi. The only way I can think of is if you have a pool is to migrate all VM’s off the pool master and do a fresh install. Then move them to the pool master. Then upgrade the other hosts and add them back to the pool.

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Yup, if only my lab could be running I could cold or warm migrate everything to rebuilt lab, upgrade production to UEFI from a clean install, then cold or warm migrate back. I still have 3 HP DL360p Gen8 with 20 cores and 128gb of ram that could be used for this job.

The UEFI warning has been in 8.3 for a while. Eventually Xen will stop supporting BIOS boot, but this is looking like an XCP-ng v9 thing (Alma 10 base). The good part is that Alma intends to continue supporting x86_64v2 processors where all the rest are stopping support right now. This may allow XCP-ng to continue to support older hardware like what I mentioned above.