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 Linux desktop or server 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’ve tried 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 make it worth investing too much into learning it. My initial observations were:

• (Plus) It may just be my imagination but in my limited interaction with VMs, they felt a little snappier in terms of interactivity compared to Proxmox/KVM. The console clipboard is a bit weird if you’re used to NoVNC but I assume I could adapt to it.
• (Plus) The console for the dom0 and guest VMs is completely persistent, which is awesome. The xsconsole manager program is also a really great management TUI as well, looks great and nice alternative to needing to do things in the GUI or command line. The dom0 console is password protected by default, which I see now in Proxmox 9.x also does. Good security practice, at least there.
• (Plus) I like the incremental backup system. It’s very efficient and I’m not aware of any equivalent in other systems.
• (Minus) It seems difficult (maybe not impossible?) to manage some things e.g. VM disk allocations, etc from the main XCP web instance only. They really seem to want you using Xen Orchestra.
• (Huge 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 for them to not send security updates to the community edition, even if it’s at a slower rate than for the paid customers, which I believe is how Proxmox works.

Does anyone use xcp in homelab environment, or only in enterprise given the cost issues? What do you like about it compared to proxmox or other multi-VM hosting solutions?