hey all - quick question - and sorry if this is answered elsewhere, i’m having a hard time searching for this because i dont think i know the correct terminology.
ive been a esxi + vmware workstation user for a very long time and part of my workflow involves booting bitlocker protected windows VMs from time to time, where I need to be able to connect and interact with the VM for password entry before it’s fully booted - so things like VNC/RDP are not an option - typically I do this by just using vmware workstation to connect directly to the esxi host and can open a ‘direct connection’ from there to the machine.
i wanted to start researching what the equivalent is for this type of a setup for proxmox or xcp-ng to see if it would work for me - can anyone point me in the right direction?
Thanks - this is really helpful. Are there non-web applications that can connect to the host machines and provide this console connection or is this something that is only available through the web management interfaces currently?
Should differentiate a little… XCP (Xen Orchestra) is not a “web” as in out on the wild web interface, it is a local HTTPS interface that can be on a VM on your system, or on a laptop sitting in front of you that you access through 127.0.0.1 (or several other ways).
Just wanted to make sure that was clear.
Also, when it is done, the XO-lite should provide a console to the VM, this is an HTTP server on each host. Functions are still very limited, but they are working on it to replace XCP-NG Center which is a Windows application that gives you all of the same controls that XO gives you. But XCP-NG Center is deprecated and the last version has recently been made available, not really recommended for new users at this point.
Was not aware of ‘XCP-NG Center’ - thanks for pointing that out to me - and something like that is what I am looking for - do you know are they going to revive the effort to maintain a tool like that? Or maybe start seeing those multi-connection managers like mRemoteNG be able to handle direct connections to XCP/Proxmox hosts to pass through these console connections into a manager where I can set up and handle many at once.
XCP-NG Center has had the last update it is ever going to have, it has been officially marked as end of support and as soon as they change enough in XCP-NG, it will be end of life and end of use.
Xen Orchestra is the official way they are going to go moving forward, that and XO-lite. XO-lite is said to be (mostly) feature parity with XCP-NG Center when XO-lite reaches release with version 6. It is still going to be an http access method and truthfully I’m OK with that.
All that said, once you get the hosts installed, and have a spare 20gb of local disk space, downloading Xen Orchestra (official appliance or from sources version) is simple enough that I haven’t looked at Center for several years. Here is a link to download/install of the from sources version:
Making sure you type everything correctly is the hardest part of installing it. And even if you buy a license for XOA, you should have at least one XO-CE running somewhere, just in case. I also like having it running on separate hardware, I can then speed up the process of building a system and or if a system crashes. Any old Debian install with 4GB of ram and 32GB of drive will work. You can even run the install script on a Raspberry Pi400 and run it from there. 4GB of RAM is really the minimum and as I said, I find a 32GB drive to be better than 16GB.
I have my standalone XO-CE running on an old HP T630 with 8GB of RAM and some random size SATA m.2 disk, something bigger than the stock 16GB but I forget the exact size.
As far as Proxmox, I have zero experience and probably won’t take the time to learn it because I just don’t have that time.
So that everyone is aware, xcpng center has a new maintainer and development is still being done there. It might not be as up to date as xen orchestra or do-lite.
I had not heard that, so maybe it remains a choice. Why didn’t Vates add that to a blog post, I certainly don’t remember reading that in the latest post, I try to make sure I read them whenever I get an email and try to watch the videos too.
