XCP was XenServer's free ISO. Citrix opened the product in 2013 and XCP died in the wiki. In 2017 Free lost live storage, dynamic memory and GPU support. Olivier Lambert, of Vates, launched a Kickstarter, called it XCP-ng — next generation — and on 31 March 2018 released 7.4. The red rocket is what remains of the open cloud of 2009, now in the Linux Foundation, with 8.3 LTS through 2028.
2009–2013: Xen Cloud Platform
At VMworld 2009 the Xen Project announced Xen Cloud Platform: a turnkey ISO with Xen + XAPI, the toolstack Citrix used in XenServer but without the closed-source part. The first ISO arrived in 2011. While XenServer was a paid product with a free subset, XCP was “the XenServer you could rebuild”. Amazon and Rackspace hosts ran the stack. The underlying hypervisor is the one in the history of Xen.
In June 2013 Citrix opened all of XenServer 6.2. XCP lost its reason to exist. The wiki pages moved to xenserver.org in 2014 with the epitaph “XCP is dead; long live XenServer”. Upgrade 1.6 → XenServer, without removing features.
2017: Free shrinks, the fork is born
7.3 (December 2017) removed from Free: storage XenMotion, dynamic memory control, GPU passthrough. Patches — including security — only in the new version and, in practice, the paid one. No public build instructions, no real community. Lambert, who had been rewriting Xen Orchestra on XAPI since 2012, wrote at the end of 2017: revive XCP, 100% free, all features. Kickstarter: a target of about US$ 6–7,5 thousand; in 30 days nearly US$ 60 thousand.
XCP-ng: the rocket
31 March 2018: XCP-ng 7.4 (Xen 4.7.5). “Friendly fork”: minimal delta, patches go upstream whenever possible. Vates SAS (France) employs the team. In January 2020 the project joined the Linux Foundation, within the Xen Project. The management UI remains Xen Orchestra — 2009 on the xen-users list, XAPI reboot in 2012, XO 6.0 in December 2025 as the default, 6.3 in March 2026 with symmetric replication.
| Version | Xen | When | Support |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7.4 → 8.1 | 4.7–4.13 | 2018–2020 | EOL |
| 8.2 LTS | 4.13.1 | 18 Nov 2020 | EOL 16 Sep 2025 |
| 8.3 LTS | 4.17.5 | 7 Oct 2024 | until 30 Nov 2028 |
8.3 started as standard and became LTS in June 2025 to make room for 9.0. Virtual disks up to 16 TB in 8.3. Signed Windows Guest Tools. V2V (VMware → Vates) in Orchestra since the 2023 preview.
Vates VMS
The company treats XCP-ng + Xen Orchestra as one stack: Vates Virtualization Management Stack. Commercial support, HCL, CSI, Terraform, Cluster API. XO Lite is the lightweight UI embedded in each host. The fork doesn't hide its origins: those coming from XenServer/Citrix Hypervisor upgrade; the API is XAPI, xe still exists, but the modern route is Orchestra or ova2xva for importing OVA/XVA without the xe.
Timeline
- 2009 — Xen Cloud Platform announced at VMworld
- 2011 — First XCP ISO
- Jun/2013 — Citrix opens XenServer 6.2; XCP loses its reason to exist
- 2014 — Wiki migrates: “XCP is dead; long live XenServer”
- Dec/2017 — 7.3 cuts Free; Olivier Lambert proposes the fork (Kickstarter, ~US$ 60 thousand)
- 31/Mar/2018 — XCP-ng 7.4 (Xen 4.7.5)
- Jan/2020 — XCP-ng joins the Linux Foundation, within the Xen Project
- 18/Nov/2020 — 8.2 LTS
- 7/Oct/2024 — 8.3 LTS (support until 30/Nov/2028)
- 2025–2026 — Xen Orchestra 6.x as default; path toward 9.0
XCP, XCP-ng, XenServer, Proxmox
XCP was the ISO. XCP-ng is the project that replaced it when the official ISO died twice — in 2013 from too much openness, in 2018 from too little. XenServer 9 (2026) returned to general-purpose workloads; the rocket had already been doing that since 7.4. Anyone preferring KVM+LXC on Debian goes to Proxmox. Anyone just wanting a VM on a laptop, VirtualBox.
The XCP name fit into a 2011 ISO. The -ng fits into an LTS through 2028. The underlying hypervisor remains Xen.