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About Xen Orchestra

Xen Orchestra is an Open Source project with more than 15 years of history. Originated by Olivier Lambert, co-founder of Vates, it quickly became a collective effort: today a dedicated team of around 20 people designs, develops and maintains it full time at Vates, alongside a worldwide community of users and contributors.

Milestones​

  • 2009: the original idea is announced on the Xen user mailing list. This first incarnation targets Xen and xend (both now long deprecated).
  • December 2012: the project is rebooted on top of XAPI for XenServer, with the first commit of the current codebase.
  • February 2014: XO 3.0, the first release of the rebooted project.
  • May 2015: XO 4.0, with a fully redesigned web interface.
  • June 2016: XO 5.0, the first release of the generation still known today as XO 5.
  • 2018: after Citrix closed a lot of XenServer features, Olivier Lambert launched XCP-ng, a fully open source fork of XenServer: successful Kickstarter campaign in early 2018, first release (XCP-ng 7.4) on March 31, 2018.
  • 2022: work starts on XO Lite, the lightweight web UI embedded in every XCP-ng host.
  • January 2023: first preview of V2V, the built-in tool to migrate VMs directly from VMware to XCP-ng.
  • November 2025: XO 5.113, the last feature release of the 5.x series.
  • December 2025: XO 6.0, the first official release of the new XO 6 interface, becomes the default UI.
  • February 2026: XO 6.2 introduces distributed backups, spreading backup data across multiple backup repositories (BR).
  • March 2026: XO 6.3 brings symmetrical replication and a rewritten immutable backup engine.
  • May 2026: XO 6.5 delivers QCOW2 general availability (disks beyond the 2 TiB VHD limit), bidirectional replication and traffic rules on networks and VIFs.
  • July 2026: XO 6.7 focuses on Rolling Pool Update reliability and keeps expanding the XO 6 workflows.

The reboot story​

The 2012 reboot was "pushed" thanks to Lars Kurth, and Xen Orchestra has also been a commercial project backed by a dedicated team since 2016. Here is a video from LinuxCon 2013 telling the story:

Part of the Vates VMS stack​

Xen Orchestra is the management and backup layer of the Vates Virtualization Management Stack (VMS), alongside the XCP-ng hypervisor. Both are developed by Vates and are fully open source: professional support for the whole platform is delivered through the stack, from the hypervisor to the management layer. See the Vates documentation for the full picture.

Feedback and issues​

Team and contributors​

See the dedicated GitHub page for all contributors.