XCP-ng
Server Virtualization France
Type-1 Xen hypervisor with central management, backup and HA pools Alternative to VMware vSphere.
Details
XCP-ng is a type-1 Xen hypervisor that installs on bare metal; Xen Orchestra is the web management plane that plays the vCenter role. A pool holds up to 64 servers and supports live migration with storage motion, high availability, storage repositories over iSCSI, NFS and Fibre Channel, and XOSTOR hyperconverged storage built on LINSTOR. Backup covers incremental, replication and immutable targets on S3, NFS, SMB and Azure. A REST API with Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi and Packer providers drives it from code.
For a VMware customer the migration path is direct: Xen Orchestra imports virtual machines from a vCenter or an ESXi host without an intermediate conversion step.
Both halves are open source — XCP-ng under the Xen Project at the Linux Foundation, Xen Orchestra under the AGPLv3. Paid plans are quoted per host from the pricing page: Essential 2,000 euro a year for up to three hosts, Pro 1,000 euro per host a year with a three-host minimum, Enterprise 1,800 euro per host. The free route is Xen Orchestra built from sources; the pre-built XOA appliance is part of the paid bundle.
One documented ceiling matters for migrations: virtual disks are capped at 2 TiB if you want snapshots and live migration. Larger disks must be passed through raw, and the documentation states snapshots and live migration are then unsupported.
About Vates
Vates SAS is registered in Grenoble under SIREN 752 155 259 and was founded in 2012. It develops XCP-ng, a type-1 Xen hypervisor hosted by the Linux Foundation under the Xen Project, and Xen Orchestra, the AGPLv3 management plane that sits on top of it. The two are sold together as Vates VMS.
The company is a plain SAS rather than a single-shareholder SASU, and its three officers are natural persons, so no holding company sits above it. It was self-funded from 2016 until October 2026, when it raised 30 million euro from IRIS and Bpifrance Large Venture — both European, with the co-founders explicitly remaining majority shareholders. Its general conditions name Vates SAS as the contracting party, are governed by French law, and give exclusive jurisdiction to the commercial court of Grenoble. The company reports around 150 staff, more than 1,000 customers and roughly 90 per cent of revenue from exports.
