Exploring XCP-ng from a VMware User's Perspective

Welcome to the first of a few videos diving deep into VMware alternatives for your #homelab and your business. In this video I dive deep into the world of XCP-ng to uncover how it compares to VMware ESXi and evaluate it as a replacement from a VMware user's perspective. It's a long video and a lot of planning, learning, and effort went into it so let us know what you think!

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**TIMESTAMPS!**
0:00 Introduction
0:52 The history of XCP-ng
2:15 Comparing features in XCP-ng to ESXi
6:27 Comparing the consoles of XCP-ng to ESXi
8:47 Comparing Xen Orchestra to local ESXi host management - a tail of two GUIs
18:06 Is XCP-ng a good replacement for VMware ESXi?
18:36 What I don't like about XCP-ng
20:34 What I love about XCP-ng
21:38 Closing! Thanks for watching!

[GuysTek]

As of today (February 12, 2024) VMware ESXi free is no longer available. 😰

[LAWRENCESYSTEMS]

Excellent video and very detailed comparison. Two things, their new UI is coming this year as is XO Lite which runs on the host and both address the more modern design look and feel. Also worht noting that not only can you move VM's between hosts in a resource pool, you can also move a VM between completely different resource pools. XO can connecting to many pools at the same time.

[awebster]

Great vid. Been using XCP-ng for many years, and like all the functionality. There is another GUI in the form of a fat client called XCP-ng center, which gives you much snappier response than the web web GUI of XOA. The parallel to this is the VMWare client of yesteryear.
XCP-ng center can connect to multiple different unrelated pools to provide you with a single consolidated interface. So you can do pretty much everything with XCP-ng center and not have to run XOA, but XOA gives you the backup functionality.
Finally, the only major issue I've run into is with purpose built virtual appliances for VMWare, migrating them to XCP-NG has proven unsuccessful in several instances.

[NeilHyndman]

This video is VERY WELL DONE! I had some of the exact questions that were asked and answered in this specific video. A lot of different sites or vloggers talk about the licensing but they don't explain it as clearly as Rich does.

[Ghandacity]

13:20 - When taking a VMware snapshot with memory, it will stun the VM at the beginning of the process. This can be quick enough you don't notice, but I have seen it make the system unavailable for up to 10 seconds.

[milicsantiago]

great video. The last thing of VM import didn't realize until you mentioned. I had to rewind the video a couple of seconds, ha! Regards form Argentina

[tylermartin]

This is an excellent video! I'm already planning to move from ESXi in my homelab to XCP-ng. I personally feel that XenServer is going to be the VMware replacement that companies are looking for, and it is great knowing that there is an open source "version" of it.

[KegRaider]

Hey great video. I only started using XCP-NG around February this year. I was an ESXi home user and decided I wanted to try something else since we use ESXi and vSphere at work and it's always good to keep the brain ticking away. I deployed their XOA guest shortly after the install, then quickly went to work rolling my own XOA on a separate server. The instructions online were not complete, with many libraries not part of the installs. A little googling around found and fixed those problems. So far, several months in I am happy with the stability and speed on XCP but yeh it's not for everyone as you say, the UI takes a lot of getting used to. The backups though! That is worth the learning curve.

[fleacero]

Wow, what a fantastic video. Well done, great work!

[hostilegoose]

Great and informative video 💪 I’m trying out Proxmox as a replacement for VMware at my job, so I’m looking forward to the VMware vs. Proxmox video 🙏

[itoffices]

great video, worth noting that XCP-NG has a desktop application from the old Xen server - XCP-ng Centre that allows you to do a lot of the tasks & setup. You can also enable a XOA-Lite version by creating a simple html file. This provides a basic web interface.

[kuhndj]

Thanks for the overview... was very handy to give me a baseline understanding of XCP-ng and how it compares to VMWare. One thing prospective users should be aware of - no NVidia vGPU support for XCP-ng at the moment so if your environment needs vgpu support you're out of luck (unless you can live with passthrough)

[minigpracing]

Should probably mention that if you are hard core enough, you can do everything from command line on the host, that includes all the VM creation and migration stuff.

Also XO has a lot less white space on low resolution monitors like the 1280x1024 in my server racks. I for one don't care how basic it looks, gets work done then I move on to other tasks. XO v6 will look more slick, preview some of this by putting XOlite on the host but know that you can't accomplish real work in lite yet. Give them time, updates are coming pretty fast for this.

[RainMan]

Gonna stock up on popcorn for the Hyper-V presentation 🙃 🍿

[jimlynch]

Great video. Thanks for the comparison. I tried to use Xen years ago but due to the very unfriendly and non-helpful user community I went elsewhere. I was forced to use VMware at a school I was volunteering at and found it a bit to complex for what it did for us. I had also installed it on my home systems for a while but gave it up for similar reasons. I just don't like it. The ui of XCP-ng reminds me of the OPNSense ui. It's not the greatest but it does get the job done.

[MSPcraps]

Thanks. I'm just looking for a hypervisor for home use and hadn't heard of xcp-ng until today.

[akurenda]

One major drawback of XCP-NG and XOA is the 2 TiB VHD limit. If you have giant SQL or File servers with one or two giant disks in ESXi, you're gonna have a hard time migrating to XCP-NG and XOA.

[tehduke]

"Giant Beard" That was so cute. :)

[xandrios]

Great introduction to XCP-NG, thanks. It indeed is painfully obvious that there are very few true enterprise options to replace VMWare outside of a home lab. How does Vates fit in this picture; they seem to offer a slightly different version of orchestra against a very different pricing model (Similar to VMWare Essentials Plus).

[liorak]

Great video, as a 2 years heavy user of xcp-ng I can tell that only their UI is not modern and looks like an old fashioned open source, BTW also their new XO lite isn’t so modern and still need to have a massive polish