Overview

Modern infrastructure does not have to be complex, fragile, or locked behind expensive licensing. With the right architecture, standards, and operational discipline, XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra can power secure, scalable, and fully professional virtualization platforms for homelabs and small businesses-without VMware. This book is not a feature tour or a collection of screenshots. It is a hands-on, production-first guide to designing, building, automating, operating, and recovering modern VMware-free infrastructure with confidence. You will start by establishing a solid architectural foundation-hosts, pools, networks, storage tiers, and control plane design-before a single workload is deployed. From there, you will implement real operational standards: templates and golden images, role-based access control, segmented networking, backup architectures with verified recovery, and automation workflows that eliminate click-ops. The book goes far beyond setup. You will learn how to: Build and secure XCP-ng pools that scale cleanly from homelabs to SMBs Design network and storage architectures that prevent common failure patterns Deploy and manage Xen Orchestra as a true control plane, not just a UI Standardize VM lifecycles using templates, cloud-init, and automation Protect workloads with tested backups, restore drills, and disaster recovery planning Migrate workloads away from VMware safely, with validation and rollback strategies Operate your platform with monitoring, alerting, patching runbooks, and failure simulations At the core of the book is a full-stack end-to-end capstone project: building a complete VMware-free mini-datacenter. You will deploy real services, enforce standards, automate provisioning, validate backups, simulate failures, and deliver a platform that can be rebuilt, audited, and handed over with confidence. Every chapter is practical. Every lab produces real artifacts. Every decision is explained in terms of why it matters operationally, not just how to configure it. This book is written for: Serious homelab builders who want production-grade discipline Small business operators seeking stability without vendor lock-in IT professionals transitioning from VMware to open-source platforms Anyone who wants infrastructure that is boring, predictable, and recoverable If you want infrastructure that survives growth, outages, and change-without panic or guesswork-this book gives you the blueprint. Build calm, modern, VMware-free infrastructure that you actually trust.

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