I’m curious, for a homelab, if I have a couple of boxes and I wanted to have load balancing, I know I have to pay for XOA (Xen Orchestra). $85 a month is a bit steep, but not too bad, I mean, it includes support.
But, why is Load Balancing locked behind a $600 a month paywall?
Is there any way around that? Or an alternative?
If you build your own Xen Orchestra from source it comes with all the functions.
The servers that you are going to use, need to be identical - memory , network cards
You will need a nas device to store all your vm hard drives on.
From sources DOES NOT come with all functions. I don’t know if the specific load balance is there, but there are several things that are not allowed in from sources. Too lazy to pull up my XO-CE and list them.
To the OP, yeah, certain things are priced right out of my department’s budget. There is a lot I’d like to pay for, but the cost just jumps beyond what I could conceivably do, it would be one of my most expensive software lines, and we use Creative Cloud (a small pile of licenses).
It’s not behind a paywall, it behind a service delivery option and support. They do include everything (including load balancing) in the XO from sources except the auto updating of XO and the XO Template Hub / Recipes which is not really a software but a service they offer to download templates. You still get the templates, but you need to download the distro ISO yourself.
XOSan is another, but that’s not really an XO thing.