How Vates professional support works
- 📦 Applies to
- XCP-ngXen Orchestra
- 🗓️ Created
- 2024-03-13
- 🔄 Updated
- 2026-10-10
- 🏷️ Tags
Vates support is built around one idea: Vates succeeds when your infrastructure runs well. The principles below follow from it. They explain what to expect from a Vates support subscription beyond answering tickets.
Aligned with your success
Support is sold as an annual subscription, not per incident. Every ticket takes engineering time, so the interest of Vates is that you need as few tickets as possible, and the reliable way to get there is an infrastructure that does not have problems in the first place. This is why there is no per-incident offer: a model that earns more when your platform fails would work against you.
Subscription revenue also funds the development of XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra: new features, security fixes and performance work that benefit your infrastructure in turn.
For the same reason, subscribing before you have an issue matters. Vates still helps a team that arrives in the middle of an incident, but support works best as a long-term partnership, with engineers who already know your environment.
Proactive, not only reactive
Support is not limited to fixing what broke. Depending on your plan, it includes:
- assistance with the initial setup
- assistance with upgrades
- best-practice recommendations
- reviews of your architecture, including hardware choices
A platform designed and configured well from the start avoids incidents later, which serves both sides.
Engineers on the line
A virtualization platform sits close to the hardware: CPUs, firmware, storage and network all interact with it. That is why Vates support is delivered by engineers and developers who work on the products themselves, with no first-level script to get through before reaching someone qualified.
When it helps, and with your agreement, engineers can work directly on your infrastructure through the secure support tunnel built into Xen Orchestra (see Create a support tunnel). It is often the fastest way to find the cause of a problem.
Simple to buy, simple to use
- Easy to subscribe. When you need to deploy quickly, a long procurement process should not stand in the way.
- Predictable pricing. Plans are priced per host, with no counting of cores, sockets or memory. See current plans and pricing.
- No artificial locks. XCP-ng has no feature locked behind a licence. A support plan adds expertise and guarantees, not features you would otherwise be denied.
Listening to users
XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra owe much of their direction to user feedback. Xen Orchestra started as a web interface for XenServer, and features such as backup were added because users asked for them. XCP-ng itself was born from the expectations of the Xen community. Customer requests continue to shape the roadmap: for example, the NetBox synchronisation in Xen Orchestra was built at a customer's request and is now used widely. The public XCP-ng roadmap shows what is coming next.
Learn more
- Plans and pricing
- Contact Vates to discuss your needs
- The original 2022 post behind this article: My vision for Open Source pro support