Cloudy Journey: XCP-ng on Hetzner dedicated hosts

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XCP-ng on Hetzner dedicated hosts
// XCP-ng

This blog post will introduce a series of "validated" hosting providers, ie hosters that are able to run XCP-ng on their bare-metal machines. The first one we are testing is Hetzner, a German company providing various hosts at competitive pricing.

The list of their available servers is here. Also, by clicking on "Dedicated" in the top menu, you'll see 5 main families of machines:

EX-LINE (Core i7-6700)
AX-LINE (Ryzen or Epyc)
PX-LINE (Xeon E3 1275)
SX-LINE (Xeon E5 1650)
DELL (Xeon Silver or Gold)

Today, we'll test the EX51-SSD plan, at €53/month, VAT included (FYI 20% cheaper if you are a EU based company, because you don't have to pay the VAT!).

Host specifications

Core i7-6700 (4 cores, 8 threads)
64GiB DDR4 RAM
2x 500GiB SSD (no hardware RAID)
1GiB/s bandwidth (30TiB/month, no overage charge but speed restricted above this limit)

Purchase it and you'll receive an email as soon it can be delivered.

Install guide

Grab the ISO

We'll install XCP-ng 7.5 on it (well, RC1 in fact, the final release is about to come ). To do that, you need to download XCP-ng ISO from the download section. Save it on your own box.

Enable remote console

To be able to install XCP-ng via the ISO, you need to go into your server view in your Hetzner administration console, and click on it:

Then, click on the "Support" tab, and ask for a "Remote Console (KVM)". You can choose the duration, max is 3h for free (this will give you enough time!).

Now you have to wait for an email telling you your KVM console is ready!

Install via remote console

The remote console needs Java (JNLP file), that you'll open. Then, click on the "floppy" icon to display the ISO selector. Browser to your XCP-ng ISO and then reboot the server (Ctrl+Alt+Del button):

You'll boot to XCP-ng! But patience, the console is relatively slow, and the ISO is read at around 900Kib/s.

Install settings

Just follow the usual steps of any XCP-ng install process. It's very easy: just use DHCP and your host will have the correct configuration. At the end, just eject the ISO, and it will reboot to XCP-ng. That's it!

Create new VMs

Before creating a new VM, you need to purchase an extra IPv4 address. In the "IP" tab of your server (in the administration console), click on the button at the bottom, called "Order additional IPs / Nets". Let's buy just one in this case:

A maximum of 6 additional single IPs can be ordered per server. But you can purchase subnets directly.

As soon you have it, you can generate a MAC address for it ("Reset Separate MAC" icon in the IP view). Please note it, so when you create the VM, you can use this MAC address. If you don't do this, the address won't be able to reach outside!

What's else? Well, thanks to this MAC address, your VM is directly assigned with the right IP via DHCP, and can reach outside, without anything to configure!.