Skip to main content

Xen Orchestra

Xen Orchestra (XO) is the web-based management platform for XCP-ng: one interface to administer, back up and automate all your pools, from a single host in a lab to hundreds of hosts across multiple sites. It is completely agent-less: nothing to install on hosts or in VMs. Xen Orchestra opens a single connection to each pool master through the XAPI toolstack, and manages every host and VM in the pool through it.

browserREST APIxo-cliXen Orchestraone appliance (XOA)XAPIXAPI···Pool 1Pool Nmaster + member hostsmaster + member hosts
Xen Orchestra · one console for every poolone XAPI connection per pool

XOA or from the sources​

There are two ways to run Xen Orchestra, and choosing between them is the most common question new users ask:

  • Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA) is a turnkey virtual machine with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, tested and maintained by Vates, updated in a few clicks from its built-in updater. XOA is the supported way to run Xen Orchestra: it is the only installation covered by Vates professional support, and the one that carries your Vates VMS bundle features. Deploying takes a few minutes: see Deploy and register XOA.
  • From the sources: Xen Orchestra is open source (AGPLv3) and you can build the full-featured application yourself from the GitHub repository, free of charge. This installation is community-supported only: no XOA updater, no professional support, and assistance happens on the forum on a best-effort basis. Follow the official from-source instructions if you take this route.

For production infrastructures, use XOA.

Xen Orchestra 5 and 6​

Xen Orchestra 6 is the new generation of the interface, and is already the default on the Latest release channel; Xen Orchestra follows a monthly release cycle. See Deploy and register XOA for the release channels, and the XO 6 documentation for what changes.

Administration at scale​

Xen Orchestra covers the full lifecycle of your infrastructure from one console: VM creation, cloning, import and export, live migration between hosts, pools and storage repositories, snapshots, host patching and rolling pool updates, and storage and network configuration (SRs, VLANs, bonds). Tags and search make large estates manageable, and cloud-init support speeds up VM provisioning. Migrating from VMware is built in as well, with a warm-migration V2V engine: see Migrate or import your VMs.

Backup and disaster recovery​

Backup is a core capability of Xen Orchestra, not an add-on. Jobs are scheduled centrally and cover complementary strategies:

  • Rolling snapshots for quick, local point-in-time rollback.
  • Full and incremental backups to external storage, with file-level restore to recover individual files without restoring the whole VM.
  • Replication, symmetrical and now bidirectional, keeping ready-to-start copies of your VMs on another pool or site, including reverse disaster-recovery plans.
  • Metadata backups for pool metadata and the XO configuration itself.
  • Distributed backups: several backup repositories pooled behind one job, for capacity and resilience.

Backup targets (remotes) include local, NFS and SMB storage as well as S3-compatible object storage. Backups can be encrypted, and immutability protects them against ransomware and tampering, either through S3 Object Lock or with the built-in on-premises mode. Backup health check automatically boots restored VMs to verify that backups are actually restorable. For remote sites and large infrastructures, XO Proxy keeps backup traffic local.

your VMsXen Orchestraor XO ProxyNFS · SMB · local remoteS3 object storageencryption · immutabilityanother poolreplication, ready to startthe backup health check boots a restored VM to prove the backup is usable
Backup · one scheduler, many targetsbackup dataXCP-ng pool

Start with the backup introduction in the Xen Orchestra documentation.

Automation and delegation​

  • Users, groups and ACLs: fine-grained permissions on objects, with authentication through LDAP, OpenID Connect and other identity providers, plus an audit log plugin.
  • Self-service: delegate resource sets so teams create their own VMs within quotas.
  • REST API and xo-cli for scripting and integration with your tooling.
  • MCP server: a first-party Model Context Protocol module, stable and covered by support, so AI assistants can query your infrastructure in natural language (read-only).
  • SDN controller plugin for pool-wide and cross-pool private networks.

Monitoring​

Live CPU, RAM, disk and network statistics for hosts and VMs, a dashboard consolidating all connected pools, scheduled usage reports and backup reports. Metrics are also exposed in Prometheus/OpenMetrics format, so hosts, VMs, storage and XOSTOR plug into your existing observability stack.

Requirements​

XOA ships as a small VM: 2 vCPUs, 2 GiB of RAM and 20 GiB of disk by default, enough for most infrastructures. See Deploy and register XOA.

Licensing​

Advanced features and professional support come with a Vates VMS bundle, which covers XCP-ng support for all your hosts plus one XOA. To evaluate the complete feature set, activate a free 30-day trial on your appliance.

Learn more​