Leaving VMware for -- XCP-ng, 2TB limit?

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

I am preparing to exit VMware/Broadcom.

I thought XCP-ng was the best destination
…and I thought XO was the destination when I walk away from VCenter
…and since Veeam B&R does not support XCP-ng, I planned to exit Veeam as well (for my backups)

I plan to use XO for backups and VM migration between two hosts.

I have several VMs I need to V2V, of these VMs there are at least three (3) VMs that have vdisks as large as 3.5 TB
(and once I v2v away from vmware I need to expand these vdisks even larger)

Suddenly I come across all these articles citing an insanely rediculous XCP-ng limitation – this cannot be the whole story.
Is it true that XCP-ng virtual machines have a vdisk maximum size limit of 2TB???

Is there ANY configuration of XCP-ng that will replace VMware ESXi’s support for VM’s with vdisks larger than 2TB
– and still retain support for backups (which I think require snapshots)

I am hoping this “guest vdisk max size 2TB” limitation is due to the use of the wrong file system (instead of EXT3 maybe EXT4 is supported, or ZFS, or, or, or, or…)

NOTE I am only interested in main stream fully supported “non-diy-custom-one-off-hack-n-wedge” solutions. VMware was production business class, I can only think about replacing VMware with something (some configuration) equally as production business class. You know: out-of-box native support… not some past time weekend tinkering with alternative drivers (so my XCP-ng servers are tweaked to run alternative drivers or such.)

I am looking for the grown up [Open Source community level] destination for leaving VMware/Broadcom.

Help me out here please! :slight_smile:

2

Yes, that is the current limitation and It’s not great storage design to stuff large volume of data in a VDI.

3

From what I remember the limit is from using VHD, if they move to VHDx or some other method of holding the image, then this limit goes away. But this isn’t even in the beta right now, and I haven’t seen much talk. I bet they are working on it for those people that have larger than 2tb images and also need to get out of VMware.

As Tom mentioned, do you really need to have those resources located on the C: (root FS) drive? What are you storing that’s this big that can’t be moved out to a shared NAS?

If it can’t be moved, then XCP-NG is not an option for you.

4

What you can do is create another iscsi target on truenas that you can implement inside of your VM. Then you can bypass the 2TB limit.

I agree with Tom. If you need 2TB for a VM I think you are going to be looking for a bad time if you are going to be taking snapshots and backups inside xen orchestra. If you set it up like I mentioned then the snapshots will be done on TrueNAS itself.

5

I just read a post that reminded me that you can indeed do this now, but you lose things like snapshot… You need to run the disk in RAW mode:

Another user mentioned that if this is Windows, you can span across 2 or more disks to have them function as a single storage space. https://www.reddit.com/r/xcpng/comments/vyl7v1/max_disk_size/

I haven’t done either of these, and I’d guess most people don’t use these because it’s not discussed very often. Overall, I’d see if there was any way to move that data off of the system drive and onto a mapped drive of some kind (NFS/SMB/iSCSI share).

6

When you say “VHD” file format… are you saying XCP-ng uses the same VHD drive format created by Connectix for Virtual PC back in 2003?

Is the XCP-ng VHD file format the same as VHD file format used by Hyper-V?

If that’s the case, the migration from Hyper-V to XCP-ng would be extremely straight forward (so long as Hyper-V is also using VHD format alreaedy). The vdisk files would not need to be V2V.

7

I have used the Windows disk2VHD tool to convert physical to virtual and it works with a direct “import” to XCP-NG, so exporting a VHD (not VHDx) out of HyperV should also be the same.