XCP-ng Blog
xcp-ng.org · Company blog · on HN since 2018
The blog of XCP-ng, an open source virtualization platform forked from XenServer, with news on Xen, Rust, Arm, and RISC-V work.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend XCP-ng as a XenServer alternative without licensing limits, praising its active community, timely updates, HA and clustering, and the Xen Orchestra tool.
28HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
31stories submitted
257story points
4 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1XCP-Ng: XenServer Community Powered14 people · 14 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2Bringing Rust to the Xen Project4 people · 14 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 3XCP-ng 8.3 is now available2 people · 17 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 4XCP-Ng/Xen on Arm with System76 and Ampere2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 5Xen 4.17 Is Released2 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6New Xen updates on RISC-V2 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 7Why Xen Wasn't Hit by RETBleed on Intel CPUs1 people · 130 points · first shared 2022 · 60 comments on HN
- 8My vision for Open Source pro support1 people · 23 points · first shared 2022 · 14 comments on HN
- 9Making Rust a first-class citizen for Xen1 people · 17 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 10Project and Release Tracking for Xen – Part 11 people · 9 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 11Solving a Xen regression on FreeBSD thanks to the community1 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12Secured Containers1 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Zstd compression coming to XenServer fork1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 14Using SPDK with Xen: performance AND security1 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 15Grant Table in Xen1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
dangerboysteve · 2019-12-05
The Xenserver fork is really great. https://xcp-ng.org/ very active community and timely updates without all the licensing restrictions.
amaccuish · 2019-03-25
I recommend everyone using XenServer to move to XCP-ng [0]. They take the XenServer sources, remove licensing restrictions and add some great new features etc (like nfs4.1, ZFS etc.). They're from the same people behind Xen Orchestra (web-based console for XenServer) [1], and offer pro support like Citrix [2].
I was about to move off XenServer with the recent changes to licensing [3] (tl;dr they removed a bunch of features from the free edition), but XCP-ng has allowed me to continue with XenServer whilst make few changes to my already-working setup.
[0] https://xcp-ng.org/
[1] https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-home
[2] https://xcp-ng.com/
[3] https://xenserver.org/blog/entry/xenserver-7-3-changes-to-the-free-edi…
mrmondo · 2019-03-25
Bit of a surprising comment - Xen is very widely used - even all of AWS is Xen (I believe), are you perhaps thinking of XenServer (Citrix's OS / Distro based on Xen)?
If you do mean XenServer, well - yes some large places are still using it but it's definitely dying out after they proved very slow to deliver new features then put a restriction on free / open source users as of 7.3 onwards that prevents clusters great that 3 hosts rendering mostly useless.
XCP-ng (https://xcp-ng.org/) is a fork of XenServer which is picked up where XenServer left off and is doing a lot in a short period of time (IMO) to add new features and build / support the community.
ofrzeta · 2025-10-19
Red Hat is offering OpenShift virtualization, which is Kubernetes with Kubevirt. So some people might just use Kubernetes with Kubevirt.
There's also Harvester "open source hyperconverged infrastructure" https://harvesterhci.io/
Or some Xen spinoff like https://xcp-ng.org/
Smaller shops are migrating to Proxmox.
dp-hackernews · 2024-04-08
XCP-ng is another good option, also does HA, and clustering
https://xcp-ng.org/
It even has a nifty graphical/cli orchestration tool to boot.
https://docs.xcp-ng.org/management/manage-at-scale/xo-web-ui/
eddyg · 2023-12-12
Don't forget about the open-source XCP-ng[1] to which you can add Xen Orchestra (which is like vCenter; a key reason people use ESXi) which has a flat-rate (no socket, host or VM limits) $2600/year Enterprise license. And XCP-ng even supports migrating from VMware[3].
[1] https://xcp-ng.org
[2] https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/xo-features/webinterface
[3] https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/10/19/migrate-from-vmware-to-xcp-ng/ and https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/04/13/how-bedrock-streaming-migrated-from…
transpute · 2023-11-23
> Does Citrix still exist
Yes, https://www.xenserver.com/ and French OSS derivative https://xcp-ng.org
Citrix is now a private company run by former Broadcom head of software who negotiated VMware acquisition, https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/citrix-tibco-new-ceo-tom-krause-5-huge-…
plam503711 · 2023-05-27
Xen provides a great security design and a protocol to do hypercall that makes sense (unlike kvm+virtio which is DMA all the way, with all the plus in terms of simplicity but the bad on the isolation aspects).
If I wanted to caricature the situation: KVM is more simple to work with in terms of dev (you have results fast), but kind of "fuck security".
Xen is hard from the dev perspective, because it's a more micro kernel by itself, and you can't cheat to have access to the memory, you have to use grant tables (see https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/07/27/grant-table-in-xen/ ).
So if a part of the industry took a shortcut, doesn't mean Xen isn't still relevant :)
bithavoc · 2022-01-29
I use XCP-Ng for orchestration[0] and Xen-Orchestra[1] for management, both are open-source. Xen-Orchestra is open-core but if you build from sources or use an unofficial docker image, you can get a lot of the commercial offering back for free at your own risk.
With Xen-Orchestra you manage one or more XCP-Ng Servers, combine them in pools, live migrate between hosts, patch your hosts and schedule VM backups to S3. It's a killer combination.
[0] https://xcp-ng.org/
[1] https://xen-orchestra.com/
baobun · 2025-10-15
A lot of the world has moved on from virtualbox to primarily qemu+kvm and to some extent xen. Usually with some higher-level tool on top. Some of these are packages you can run on your existing OS and some are distributions with hypervisor for people who use VMs as part of their primary workflows. If you just want quick-and-easy one-off Windows VM and move on, check out quickemu.
Libvirt and virt-manager https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Libvirt
Quickemu https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu
Proxmox VE https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
QubesOS https://qubes-os.org
Whonix https://whonix.org
XCP-ng https://xcp-ng.org/
You can also get some level of isolation by containers (lxc, docker, podman).
ilyt · 2023-05-27
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/content/images/size/w2000/2023/05/riscvbanner3…
the banner one is worse, just look at those sockets or nailbed radiators
dale_glass · 2023-05-27
Definitely:
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/content/images/2023/02/riscvdc.jpg
The broken text makes is very clear.
But that's exactly the market I thought AI would eat first. The blog posts need some sort of picture to represent the general idea of a high tech server. Nobody cares which exact thing it is and if it even exists. In many respects a non-existent one may be better, it won't get obviously old.
So why pay money for a stock picture where you could have a passable substitute for free?
tgtweak · 2023-05-27
A quick test-run on the pages linked from the hackernews front page:
hackernews svg logo doesn't render
youtube embed on the servo homepage doesn't load
https://github.com/tpope/timl -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core
https://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/the-obvious-final-step/ -> hangs while loading the page, uses 100% of 1 core
https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/ -> loads/renders fine
https://github.com/reactos/reactos -> reloads/rerenders infinitely, uses 100% of 1 core
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/05/27/dolphin-steam-indefinitely-pos… -> loads fine but css rendering/placement is off on breadcrumbs and article
https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2023/05/23/new-xen-updates-on-risc-v/ -> very long load then hangs while loading javascript/content.
Not a great batting average - seems like sites need to be purpose built for this or leverage little/no modern javascript libraries for it to render accurately. Servo has been in this state for the last 5 or 6 years since I first discovered it.
jka · 2022-05-26
For anyone curious about potential open-source migration options given the prospect of uncertainty around VMware pricing and support:
- xcp-ng[1] is a support-available fork of XenServer. Migration[2] can be performed using export to OVA format and subsequent import into the built-in Xen-Orchestra interface.
- proxmox-ve[3] provides a management UI for Linux Virtual Machine (LVM) and Linux Containers (LXC) hosts and provides various vendor migration guides[4]. Both commercial and community support[5] is available.
- The Xen Hypervisor[6] is capable of hosting x86 and ARM virtual hosts, and their project provides a VMware migration guide[7]
[1] - https://xcp-ng.com/
[2] - https://xcp-ng.org/docs/migratetoxcpng.html#from-vmware
[3] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
[4] - https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE#Virtua…
[5] - https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve/support
[6] - https://xenproject.org/developers/teams/xen-hypervisor/
[7] - https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Migration_from_VMware