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How to install Xen Orchestra for XCP-ng

What Xen Orchestra is, why Xen Tools matter, the VM sizing to use, and a straightforward path to install XO for managing your XCP-ng hosts.

3 min readBy Michael NarehoodLinux

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Xen Orchestra (XO) is a management platform for XCP-ng and Citrix Hypervisor environments. It gives you a web UI, CLI, and REST API for day-to-day virtualization work without installing an agent on every host.

XO is agentless on the hypervisor side. You can optionally install XCP-ng / Xen Tools inside each VM for better metrics and guest features. Common capabilities include dashboards, VM lifecycle management, backup, delegation, live migration, and continuous replication. It also works with automation tooling such as Terraform.

There are two common ways to run it:

  • Open-source Xen Orchestra: install from source / community installers; more flexible
  • Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): turnkey appliance with commercial support

For many labs and SMB setups, a community install on a small Linux VM is enough to get productive quickly.

Useful references:

Overview of Xen Tools

Xen Tools (guest utilities/drivers) improve VM performance and manageability on XCP-ng:

  • Paravirtualized network and disk drivers for better I/O
  • Time sync with the host
  • Clean shutdown/reboot from the hypervisor
  • Memory ballooning
  • Richer metrics for monitoring

When tools are installed in guests, Xen Orchestra can show more accurate health and performance data and handle operations like live migration more reliably.

Prerequisites

Minimum

  • 1 vCPU
  • 3 GiB RAM
  • 10 GiB disk
  • 2 vCPUs
  • 3 GiB RAM (more if you manage hundreds of VMs)
  • 20 GiB disk for updates and growth

Other notes

  • OS: minimal Ubuntu or Debian Server works well
  • Network: the XO VM must reach your XCP-ng hosts on the management network
  • Give it more resources if you want; these are baselines, not ceilings

Community installer references:

1. Prepare the VM

Create a Linux VM on XCP-ng for Xen Orchestra. Before you run the XO installer, it helps to have:

  • XCP-ng Tools installed in the guest
  • Basic utilities (net-tools, cockpit or similar, htop)
  • The guest fully updated

If your prep script offers a “configure the VM first” option, run that before the XO install option.

2. Run the install script

Use the community installer flow for Xen Orchestra Community Edition on the prepared Ubuntu/Debian VM. The exact menu text can change over time, but the pattern is:

  1. Prepare / update the VM
  2. Install Xen Orchestra
  3. Wait for the process to finish without interrupting it

3. First login

When installation completes, open the XO web UI using the VM’s hostname or IP on port 80.

Default credentials on a fresh community install are typically:

  • User: admin@admin.net
  • Password: admin

Do this immediately:

  1. Create a new admin account with your own credentials
  2. Sign in as that account
  3. Delete the default admin account

Then add your XCP-ng host(s) and confirm pools, storage, and networks look correct before you rely on it for production changes.

4. Validate the result

  • Confirm the host shows connected in XO
  • Install Xen Tools on important VMs if they are missing
  • Create a test VM action (start/stop or snapshot) so you know permissions and connectivity are solid
  • Document the XO URL and your new admin account in your runbook

Xen Orchestra becomes much more valuable once backups and permissions are configured. Those are good follow-on projects after the base install.