April 6, 2021
Get XCP-ng preinstalled on the Vault
As part of Protectli's continued love affair with Open Source Software, we are proud to announce a partnership with XCP-ng, the turnkey open source hypervisor. XCP-ng is a hypervisor that we have used professionally and personally and we couldn’t be more excited to offer our customers a turn-key way to get XCP-ng on Protectli hardware.
Starting today, April 6 2021, customers can order a Vault with XCP-ng pre-installed, giving you a pain-free way to get up and running out of the box. While XCP-ng will be available as a pre-install for any Vault, this solution gets really interesting when considering our latest and most powerful hardware, the FW6D and FW6E.
How XCP-ng fits in
XCP-ng is an incredibly popular Type 1 Hypervisor with roots in the Xen project. Since its inception, it has been downloaded over 200,000 times! It’s no wonder that many of you have been asking us about XCP-ng and why we don’t have any documentation on using it with the Vault (so has XCP-ng). Well, not only have we fully documented how to get up and running with XCP-ng on the Vault, but we’ve done one better – we’re now giving you the option to purchase a Vault with the latest XCP-ng pre-installed.
Also of interest, Protectli isn’t just running the standard installation and setting default values. We’ve worked with the fine folks at XCP-ng to implement an installation based on PXE. The advantage to this is an out of box experience that doesn’t provide a default password – it requires the user to set their own password on first boot! So you can get the fully custom installation experience without having to organize a USB installer and doing the installation yourself.
The perfect hardware?
Virtualization in general is a workload that necessitates large amounts of computer resources. The more CPU and memory available on the host, the more that the user can run on that host. This is why our newly-launched FW6D and FW6E are a perfect fit. The FW6E is a 4 core / 8 thread beast that is based on an Intel i7 8550U which can turbo up to 4 GHz. What’s more – you can fit up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and ~5TB of SSD-based storage (1TB of mSATA and 4TB of 2.5” SATA) all in a compact platform. You don’t have to “go ‘big” to realize the benefits of XCP-ng though. This amazing hypervisor will run on any Vault in the Protectli lineup, even on down to the 2-port FW2B.
This flexibility makes for an extremely cost-effective platform that is fanless and sips power. So your entire stack, be it a development environment, a homelab, or even just your personal intro to virtualization, can sit in your bedroom or on your desk and still pass “spouse approval”.
The trifecta!
Protectli offers coreboot for most of the Vaults. coreboot is an open source BIOS that is both lightweight and performant. A Vault running coreboot boots in seconds and is tuned for the hardware, so you can be sure that you’ll be getting every ounce of power available to you. Combined with XCP-ng, this solution offers a fully open source stack that is powerful, efficient, silent and capable of running tremendous workloads. Ready to give it a try? Start with a 6-port Vault and select XCP-ng during configuration.
As always, Protectli support can be reached should you have any questions — contact us directly or check out our resources.