Hey folks. My understanding of the self-hosting world is that Proxmox is kinda the king of the roost, and deservedly so. I use it myself both for personal and work projects, and love what it provides. I’ve also used TrueNAS Core/SCALE, and of course just traditional desktop distros of various sorts for projects, but out of the corner of my eye has always been sitting XCP-NG. It seems like it could be a real contender in the space.

I installed it a handful of times, and each time it felt like something with a lot of potential, but the freemium model just felt too onerous to overcome investing too much into learning it. My initial observations were:

  • (Minus) It seems difficult (maybe not impossible?) to manage some things e.g. VM disk allocations, etc from the main XCP web instance. They really seem to want you using Xen Orchestra.
  • (Plus) The console for the dom0 and guest VMs is persistent (plus). The xsconsole manager program is actually a really awesome TUI
  • (Minus) The licensing seems extremely expensive compared to Proxmox, to the point where it seems out of reach as a homelab solution. I also really don’t like that they don’t push updates to the Community edition XO. I know there are some scripts on github to work around this, but it just seems like such a bad look to not send security updates, even if it’s at a slower rate than for the paid customers, which I believe is how proxmox works.