I did a quick search to see if this topic was covered yet, didn’t find anything.
Anyone running the XCP-NG 8.3 Beta version yet? I borked one of my lab servers and I have a new to me raid controller card on the way, so I decided I’m going to just wipe everything and start from almost scratch. Only thing I’m keeping is Truenas at whatever the most recent production level might be.
Also going to try the NET installer this time and see what happens, I normally use the full installer, hoping that any updates will get applied during the net install process.
Hope it still supports my old HP DL360p Gen8 servers, should be fine though.
One big thing, 8.3 support vTPM which should make Windows 11 and probably future Server versions happy (I’m sure Microsoft will “secure” our servers with TPM2 on the next upgrade). Break out those Win11 evals! Win11 LTSC is supposed to be out first half of 2024, so this is good timing to get the servers up and running so I can figure out how I’m going to deploy it in my production system.
I had a bit of time to fool with this, just completed the basic install over HP iLO with the net version. Had a problem I’ll detail below, but over all a much slower process than using the complete installer. Took from 09:20 to 10:32 with a delay to fix something. I did perform the media validation step which added time, but with a net install I’d probably recommend it.
When using the net installer, make sure your firewall isn’t going to false block part of the process:
If anyone from Vates reads this, can you make the error time out faster? I had the problem fixed in around 1-2 minutes and it seems like it never tried to connect after that time, so error after it is done trying would be nice. Maybe give it a 5 minute window?
2 more servers to go. Since there doesn’t seem to be any updates applied, I may use the full local installer for the other two, should be faster in the end.
There is another change, this involves XO Lite. You no longer go to http://your.local.ip/xolite.html now you simply go to http://your.local.ip/ and you should get a log in page. You still can’t do anything but monitor, but give them time to get that system working.
Just an FYI… The net installer DOES NOT pull patches as it installs! I just connected XO (from sources) to one of these new 8.3 servers, and there are 36 patches needed.
The second server took 30 minutes to install. The third server will get the full installer ISO so I can contrast the install time.
I’ve decided that installing over iLO is a time waster, took 45 minutes to install with the full installer. I think going forward I’ll need to put the installer on a USB device and connect that locally. I never saw more than 4 to 5 MBps transfer from my PC to the server using iLO for the transfer, might be my old servers too, but when I do regular file transfers I get close to gigabit speeds between my PC and my test lab.
This last attempt with the full installer I skipped verification, same as the second install. I know, really boring details that no one cares about, but it might help someone down the road. If I tear it down again, maybe I’ll put the installer on an NFS on the lab storage and see if that is faster.
I should try that, but the only distance I have is through my firewall. They’ve changed the installer a little so maybe that is some part of the problem. But at least it is done now and I’m back to being able to build VMs. I do need to look into the vTPM I looked around in the UEFI and didn’t see where I could select which version of TPM was being used. I saw a reference to this in one of the blog posts, I’ll have to go back and read about it again.
