New Home Hypervisor - XCP-ng/ Xen Orchestra
With Broadcom's recent licensing changes for VMware, I decided to change the hypervisor for my home lab. After evaluating several freely available options likely to work in an enterprise environment, I chose the XCP-ng/Xen Orchestra solution. When reviewing XCP-ng as a solution, it appears to be the closest to running VMware while maintaining an open-source foundation. The stack consists of two main components: XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra. XCP-ng is the equivalent of ESXi and is directly installed on the hardware. With the recent release of 8.3, XOA-Lite is now part of the stack, allowing for a GUI experience on the host without requiring an external controller. Xen Orchestra is a vCenter-like control plane that centralizes control. Unlike vCenter, it is installed on another machine, and hosts can be controlled by multiple XO instances. For day-to-day operations, it runs on an Ubuntu server VM, though I have an instance installed through my main laptop's WSL instance. Overall, t...