{"id":524,"date":"2026-09-06T00:42:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T03:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2026\/09\/a-historia-do-xcp\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T08:19:41","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T11:19:41","slug":"a-historia-do-xcp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-do-xcp\/","title":{"rendered":"The history of XCP: the open cloud and XCP-ng"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mascote<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 next generation<\/em> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2009\u20132013: Xen Cloud Platform<\/h2>\n

At VMworld 2009 the Xen Project announced Xen Cloud Platform: a turnkey ISO with Xen + XAPI, the toolstack Citrix used in XenServer<\/a> but without the closed-source part. The first ISO arrived in 2011. While XenServer was a paid product with a free subset, XCP was \u201cthe XenServer you could rebuild\u201d. Amazon and Rackspace hosts ran the stack. The underlying hypervisor is the one in the history of Xen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cXCP is dead; long live XenServer\u201d. Upgrade 1.6 \u2192 XenServer, without removing features.<\/p>\n

2017: Free shrinks, the fork is born<\/h2>\n

7.3 (December 2017) removed from Free: storage XenMotion, dynamic memory control, GPU passthrough. Patches \u2014 including security \u2014 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\u20137,5 thousand; in 30 days nearly US$ 60 thousand.<\/p>\n

XCP-ng: the rocket<\/h2>\n

31 March 2018: XCP-ng 7.4 (Xen 4.7.5). \u201cFriendly fork\u201d: 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Version<\/th>\nXen<\/th>\nWhen<\/th>\nSupport<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
7.4 \u2192 8.1<\/td>\n4.7\u20134.13<\/td>\n2018\u20132020<\/td>\nEOL<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
8.2 LTS<\/td>\n4.13.1<\/td>\n18 Nov 2020<\/td>\nEOL 16 Sep 2025<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
8.3 LTS<\/td>\n4.17.5<\/td>\n7 Oct 2024<\/td>\nuntil 30 Nov 2028<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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 \u2192 Vates) in Orchestra since the 2023 preview.<\/p>\n

Vates VMS<\/h2>\n

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<\/code> still exists, but the modern route is Orchestra or ova2xva<\/a> for importing OVA\/XVA without the xe<\/code>.<\/p>\n

Timeline<\/h2>\n