Multi-sourcing virtualization workloads is no longer just an option — it’s becoming a necessity for many customers. While VMware remains the most complete stack, leveraging more than 20 years of development, open-source alternatives are now offering enterprise-ready virtualization solutions that provide a viable alternative for most organizations.
XCP-NG is one of them, and I’m really glad to see them gaining traction in the field, with Pure Storage customers actively considering their solution.
This is why I will write several articles about this solution and its integration with Pure Storage platforms.
But first, a quick introduction:
Vates is a French open-source company that develops and maintains two key products: XCP-NG, a virtualization platform, and Xen Orchestra (XO), its management and backup interface.
XCP-NG is built on top of the Xen hypervisor and was created as a fully open-source alternative to Citrix XenServer — and increasingly, as a migration path for organizations moving away from VMware following Broadcom’s licensing changes. It supports core enterprise features such as live migration, high availability, GPU passthrough, and integration with shared storage over iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel.
Xen Orchestra serves as the centralized management layer. From a single web UI, administrators can manage multiple XCP-NG pools, schedule backups and replication, monitor performance, and orchestrate VM lifecycle operations. It also supports REST API access for automation.
Together, XCP-NG and Xen Orchestra provide a production-ready virtualization stack with no per-socket or per-VM licensing, making it an attractive option for organizations looking to reduce costs while maintaining enterprise capabilities. Vates offers commercial support subscriptions for production environments.
For more information: https://vates.tech/
In the following articles of this series, I will dive deeper into their solution and its integration with our Pure Storage platforms in our lab — so stay tuned!