How To Install Xen Orchestra (With All Features) And Update It

At our school we use Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) (soon xcp-ng) to virtualize our school server and other applications. Citrix provides XenCenter, a management tool for Windows. With it you can easily manage all virtual machines and make settings on the Citrix Hypervisor. Another possibility is Xen Orchestra. It is a web-based tool that can do much more than XenCenter. On the website you can download a completely configured appliance. This is however strongly limited by the features (you have approx. 2 weeks time to test all features). Therefore I would like to give you a little tip how to install Xen Orchestra – with all features of the Enterprice and Premium Edition.

Install Xen Orchestra

Xen Orchestra is an open source project, so you can take the source code and install it yourself. You can find the instructions in the official documentation. On Github you will also find an installation script which performs the installation automatically. With this you can install Xen Orchestra in a few steps. On a fresh Ubuntu LTS server you only have to execute the following commands:

$ sudo bash
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jarli01/xenorchestra_installer/master/xo_install.sh | bash

That was it already 🙂 You can access Xen Orchestra now with IP of the server. The default username is [email protected], the password is admin.

Update Xen Orchestra

When you’ve finished setting up Xen Orchestra and you should of course keep it up to date to get all security updates and new features. Actually every version brings some new features, which extend or facilitate the work with the XenServer (or xcp-ng). The author of the installation script provides another script for the updates. It can also be found on Github.

The update script offers several options. The following call is sufficient for a basic update:

$ sudo bash
$ sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jarli01/xenorchestra_updater/master/xo-update.sh | bash

After a few minutes Xen Orchestra is up to date again!

If you feel uncomfortable running a script from the net as root, you can of course take a look at the script to see exactly what it does or doesn’t do 🙂

Bottom line

Xen Orchestra is a great project. Our XenServer is easy to manage. Backups are quickly created (recently also backups of the configuration of Xen Orchestra) including notifications (eMail or Slack / Mattermost). These two scripts made our lives a lot easier. A big thank you to Jarli01!