New XO virtual Appliance [feedly]

New XO virtual Appliance
http://xen-orchestra.com/blog/new-xo-virtual-appliance-2/

-- via my feedly newsfeed

In the next weeks, we'll release a new version of the virtual appliance itself, which is running Xen Orchestra.

This new appliance will be unified, more secure, faster and easier to use. Let's see why!

Unified XOA? It means one XOA to rule them all. No dedicated version of Free, Starter, Enterprise or Premium. Because our updater is able to "transform" it on-the-fly. Doesn't matter if you upgrade or downgrade, just run the update and you are OK!

Security

Sudo

Root account password is now disabled. You'll connect via a xoa user, and use sudo to make system operations.

Password change

After your first connection to XOA with xoa user and xoa password (SSH or via console), the system will ask you to change your password.

Firewall

By default, XOA is now behind a firewall. SSH is even protected with a rate limit rule. We'll update the doc to give you more details on how to configure it if necessary, but only needed ports are open. XOA stays turnkey (you can reach it without any pre-configuration), but it's far more secure!

Speed

This new appliance is running in PVHVM mode. In general, this give a 15% performance boost, see our previous article on PV vs PVHVM XenServer benchmark.

Simplicity

Bashrc

We added a bashrc file to have a beautiful prompt, helping you to have a distinct shell on XOA.

The prompt also display any change in a Git repository (see the next paragraph).

/etc in Git

This will allow to track changes done in the XOA conf, and rollback if necessary.

SSH support ready

A xoa-support account exists, but can only log via a SSH key pair (no password), that we only have (ie the private key). If you don't want this, you can disable the account with the chage -E 0 xoa-support command.

Built for tomorrow

Extra packages are also include for future possibilities in XOA. It also includes the latest LTS version of Node (6).

Want to test it?

Beside your production XOA, you can make a try if you like. You can download it from here (only XS7 compatible for now, but will be 6.x too in the final release).