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Deploy on XenServer/XCP-ng

You'll need a machine running either the XenServer or XCP-ng hypervisor. XenServer is a commercial offering that used to have a free edition but now only has a time-limited trial. XCP-ng is an open source fork of the XenServer project, back when it was open source too.
XCP-ng is completely free.

We've been using XCP-ng for about 5 years now and have been happy with it.

You'll need an AMD64 compatible computer for this. This doesn't need to be particularily high powered but should minimially have:

  • cpu: 4 cores
  • memory: 16+ GB
  • disk: 500GB SSD

XenServer/XCP-ng v8.2+ is required.

Download and install either XenServer or XCP-ng, following the instructions on the respwctive site. Make a note of the IP Address assigned to the machine as well as the root password you created.

Deploy a NeonKUBE Cluster on AZURE

Cluster Definition​

First, you'll need to save this cluster definition as a YAML file on your machine. This provisions a single node cluster on your Xen machine.

Be sure to make these substitutions first:

  • [XEN_HOST_PASSWORD]: change this to the root password you created when you deployed the Xen machine.

  • [XEN_HOST_ADDRESS]: change this to the Xen machine's IP address.

  • Network: change network.gateway and network.premiseSubnet to the settings for your local LAN and also set nodes.control-0.address to an unused address on the LAN.

name: my-xen-cluster
hosting:
  environment: xenserver
  vm:
    hostUsername: root
    hostPassword: [XEN_HOST_PASSWORD]
    namePrefix: vm_prefix
    hosts:
      - name: MY-XEN-SERVER
        address: [XEN_HOST_ADDRESS]
network:
  gateway: 10.100.0.1
  premiseSubnet: 10.100.0.0/16
nodes:
  control-0:
    role: control-plane
    address: 10.100.1.100
    vm:
      host: MY-XEN-SERVER
      cores: 4
      memory: 8GiB
      osDisk: 64GiB

Cluster Deployment via NeonDESKTOP​

  1. Right click the NeonDESKTOP icon in the taskbar > Deploy cluster

  2. Use the file picker to select the cluster definiton file you saved above

  3. Grab a coffee and wait for NeonDESKTOP to deploy the cluster.

Cluster Deployment via NeonCLI​

Cluster deployment happens in two phases:

  • Configuring the hosting infrastructure, which involves configuring the Resource Group, VPC, starting the Instances, configuring the LoadBalancer, IP Addresses, Disks, etc.

  • Setting up the cluster. This involves configuring Linux and Kubernetes and then installing the necessary cluster components via Helm charts.

Execute the commands to deploy this cluster, passing the PATH to the cluster definition file you saved above and CLUSTERNAME to the cluster name as defined in the definition:

Prepare the cluster infrastructure (change PATH to your cluster definition path)

neon cluster prepare /path/to/your/cluster-definition.yaml

Setup the cluster

neon cluster setup sysadmin@my-xen-cluster

Then wait for cluster setup to complete.

note

These operations are currently coordinated by NeonDESKTOP or NeonCLI running on your machine, so you'll need to keep your computer running and connected to the network.

We plan on supporting cloud based deployment in the future where these operations will be managed in the cloud, rather than from your computer.