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XCP-ng / XenServer Integration

Audience: operator · Profile: demo · Read this when: your VMs live on XCP-ng or XenServer.

The dashboard connects to an XCP-ng or XenServer host or pool master via the XAPI XML-RPC API using Python's built-in xmlrpc.client — no external SDK required.

Enable it in Settings → Integrations. That sets the xcpng_enabled feature flag, and the XCP-ng page appears in the navigation at /xcpng.

Prerequisites

Connection Notes

• Always use the pool master address. XAPI sessions initiated against a secondary host will redirect internally, but using the master address avoids the extra hop.
• XAPI uses HTTPS on port 443 by default. The certificate is self-signed on stock installs — disable Verify SSL in Settings unless you have replaced it with a trusted certificate.

Power Operations

In bulk. Tick several rows and the toolbar sends Start, Shutdown, Power Off or Reboot to the whole selection — one job per VM, sharing a batch you watch on one page. VMs already in the target state are skipped and the confirmation says how many; fifty per operation is the cap. See Powering a selection.

Those four only. The rest of the table above stays per-VM: each of them depends on the state the VM is in right now — Resume needs a suspended VM, Unpause a paused one — which is a judgement to make one machine at a time rather than across a selection.

Tags. XCP-ng tags are not read yet, so VMs here show no tag chips and do not appear under Inventory's Tag filter. Proxmox is the only hypervisor that reports tags today; see Cloud VMs — Tags and labels.

Scheduling power. On a connection bound to a remote agent, the bulk power toolbar's Schedule tick books the operation for a time or a change window. A directly dialled connection cannot be booked, and each of its VMs is refused by name. See Scheduling.

Installing xe-guest-utilities

xe-guest-utilities (the XCP-ng equivalent of VMware Tools) enables ACPI-based graceful shutdown and reboot, and provides in-guest IP address reporting.

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install -y xe-guest-utilities
sudo systemctl enable xe-linux-distribution
sudo systemctl start  xe-linux-distribution

RHEL / Rocky / AlmaLinux / CentOS

sudo dnf install -y xe-guest-utilities
sudo systemctl enable xe-linux-distribution
sudo systemctl start  xe-linux-distribution

SUSE / openSUSE Leap

sudo zypper install -y xe-guest-utilities
sudo systemctl enable xe-linux-distribution
sudo systemctl start  xe-linux-distribution

Windows

Install the XCP-ng Windows Guest Tools from the XCP-ng project:
https://github.com/xcp-ng/win-pv-drivers/releases

Host Filter

The VM list page includes a Host filter dropdown. It is auto-populated from the host reference returned by the XAPI — one entry per host in the pool. No extra configuration needed.

VM Visibility

The integration filters out:

• Templates (is_a_template = true)
• The control domain / dom0 (is_control_domain = true)
• Snapshot VMs (is_a_snapshot = true)

Only real, runnable VMs are shown.

Troubleshooting

Checking connectivity from the dashboard container

docker exec -it vm-dashboard python3 -c "
import xmlrpc.client, ssl
ctx = ssl.create_default_context(); ctx.check_hostname=False; ctx.verify_mode=ssl.CERT_NONE
s = xmlrpc.client.ServerProxy('https://<xcpng-host>', context=ctx)
r = s.session.login_with_password('root', '<password>', '2.0', 'dashboard-test')
print(r)
"

A successful response begins with {'Status': 'Success', 'Value': 'OpaqueRef:...'}.

Multiple connections

Connection details used to live in Settings as a single set of fields, so there could only ever be one XCP-ng pool. They now live on the Connections tab of the Remote Agents page (/connections), which holds as many as you like — a second XCP-ng pool at another site, or the same one under a read-only and a privileged service account.

• The default connection is what every page and API call uses when not told otherwise. The first connection of a kind becomes the default automatically.
• Pass ?connection_id=<id> to any /api/xcpng endpoint to target a specific one.
• Job-backed operations (deploys, power verbs) record the connection at enqueue, so changing the default while one is queued cannot redirect it.

Your existing Settings values (xcpng_host, xcpng_username, xcpng_password, xcpng_verify_ssl) were copied into the first connection on upgrade, and are still read as a fallback while no connection of this kind exists. The old panel is still there, read-only, with a banner pointing here — editing it no longer changes what the dashboard connects to. It is kept so that rolling back to a previous image still works.

Over a remote agent

A XCP-ng pool the dashboard has no network route to can be reached through a remote agent instead. Tick Reached through a remote agent when adding the connection and give it the name that connection has in the agent's own connections.yaml.

The dashboard then stores no host and no credential for it — only the name. The agent uses XAPI over XML-RPC, from the standard library, which needs no dependency the agent does not already have.

Three separate grants must line up: the dashboard grants the agent the agent_hypervisor job type, your policy.yaml grants the individual verbs on that connection, and your connections.yaml defines it. Withhold any one and nothing runs.

When the connection is reached through an agent

The dashboard has no route to an agent-bound connection — that is the point of binding it to an agent — so this page cannot query it live. It shows the last synced inventory instead, with a banner saying so and how old it is. Live-only figures (CPU usage, uptime, disk) are blank there rather than zero: they were never measured, and a fabricated 0 is worse than an empty cell.

Power actions still work: they are dispatched to the agent as jobs and appear on /jobs with Live Output, exactly like a discovery scan. Start, Force Off, Shutdown, Reboot and Hard Reboot all map to a verb; Suspend, Resume, Pause and Unpause do not, and are refused with a 501 naming what is available rather than approximated onto a neighbouring operation — see the verbs.

Shutdown and Reboot are the two that need the guest utilities. The synced inventory carries no tools_installed, so those buttons are offered rather than hidden — and no "⚠ No guest tools" badge is shown either, since the sync never measured it — and XAPI is what answers if xe-guest-utilities is missing.