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Comparison

Fabric vs XCP-ng

XCP-ng is a mature open-source hypervisor with an excellent management and backup layer in Xen Orchestra. What it is not, out of the box, is a hyperconverged platform: shared storage is an add-on and multitenancy is not the model. Fabric starts from the other end.

Comparing Fabric with XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra (Vates) (Vates). Updated 2026-09-03. Fabric is in closed beta today. General availability is planned for Q1 2027. Competitor facts are drawn from public documentation and published or verified pricing; corrections welcome.

The short version
  • XCP-ng is free; Vates sells per-host support and Xen Orchestra Appliance plans. Fabric is free in Community and per node by class when supported.
  • Xen Orchestra’s built-in backup, continuous replication and VMware import are shipping strengths; Fabric’s equivalents are roadmap items.
  • Fabric ships distributed storage, per-tenant SDN, verified fencing and a tenant portal as the product; XCP-ng pools top out at 16 hosts and add hyperconvergence via a separate storage layer.
Pricing at a glance

One dual-socket server, 32 physical cores, fully loaded with VMs (annual, list unless noted)

Fabric — Medium class
$1,800/ node / yr

Fabric Community is free and unlimited; Medium class $1,800 per node per year with everything included.

XCP-ng
Free software; support per host via Vates

Model: Free hypervisor (GPL). Vates support per host and Xen Orchestra Appliance subscription plans; hyperconverged storage (XOSTOR) supported as an add-on.

Basis: Vates publishes tiered plans; totals depend on host count and plan, 2026.

Dimension by dimension

Fabric vs XCP-ng, honestly scored.

Where XCP-ng is ahead we say so. Roadmap items are labelled and count against Fabric until they ship.

6 Fabric 2 XCP-ng 5 Even 13 dimensions · roadmap items count against Fabric until they ship
Fabric compared with XCP-ng, dimension by dimension
DimensionFabricXCP-ngEdge
Licensing model Per physical node by node class (five core bands: ≤8 / 9–16 / 17–32 / 33–64 / 65+), every feature in every class, free unlimited Community edition. No per-core meter, no feature matrix.Free hypervisor; per-host support and orchestrator subscriptions from Vates.Even
What you install One signed firmware image per node plus a control-plane appliance.XCP-ng on each host plus a Xen Orchestra virtual appliance for management and backup.Even
Storage Distributed block storage pooled across every node, driven by storage policies: ordered device tiers, copies and minimum copies, host- or rack-level failure domains, per-disk IOPS/bandwidth QoS and inline compression with in-place re-pack. No SAN and no storage licence.Shared storage over NFS/iSCSI/FC or local; hyperconverged storage via XOSTOR, a separately supported layer.Fabric
Networking Per-tenant SDN in the platform: overlay or VLAN-backed virtual networks, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, built-in DHCP/DNS, micro-segmentation policies, distributed stateless gateways and ARP or BGP announcement of public prefixes. Not a separate SDN licence.VLANs and Open vSwitch bridges; SDN controller for private networks across hosts; no tenant DHCP/DNS or gateways.Fabric
High availability Acknowledged 10-second heartbeats, a liveness verdict in about 20 seconds, and no restart elsewhere until the failed node is verifiably fenced — powered off through its own BMC and blocked at the storage layer.Pool HA with a heartbeat storage repository and host self-fencing.Fabric
Live migration Live migration; hibernate and resume on any node.Live migration within and between pools, including storage migration.Even
Updates and lifecycle One signed A/B firmware image per node carries the hypervisor, storage, networking and agent. A rolling update evacuates each node by live migration, flips its image slot and rolls back automatically if it does not come up healthy.Rolling pool updates orchestrated from Xen Orchestra; host-level packages.Fabric
Multitenancy Built in. Tenants, quotas, isolated per-tenant networks with their own DHCP/DNS, and a tenant self-service portal with browser consoles — the same product an MSP bills monthly per node.Users, groups and ACLs with a self-service section in Xen Orchestra; no isolated per-tenant networks by default.Fabric
Backup and DRRoadmap Snapshots and cross-site replication are on the roadmap.Xen Orchestra backup, delta backup, continuous replication and disaster-recovery jobs built in — a standout.XCP-ng
Pool and cluster size One node to many racks in one fabric.Sixteen hosts per pool; larger estates are multiple pools.Fabric
Air-gapped operation Designed for it: local sign-in (password, TOTP, passkeys — never an emailed link), a control plane on your own appliance, signed updates imported and verified on site, no phone-home, no kill-switch.Runs offline; update repositories can be mirrored.Even
VMware migrationRoadmap Turnkey ESXi import is on the roadmap.Xen Orchestra’s V2V import from VMware is shipping and widely used.XCP-ng
Hardware Commodity x86-64, any drive mix.Broad x86 support; hyperconverged storage needs matched local disks.Even
Who should pick which

Choose Fabric if… Choose XCP-ng if…

Fabric is the better fit for

  • Teams that want hyperconverged storage and networking as the product, not an add-on
  • MSPs who need a tenant portal and per-tenant networks
  • Fleets beyond sixteen hosts per cluster
  • Buyers who want verified fencing and rollback-safe firmware updates

XCP-ng is the better fit for

  • Shops with existing shared storage arrays
  • Teams that need built-in backup and VMware import today
  • Former XenServer / Citrix Hypervisor estates

Moving from XCP-ng to Fabric

XCP-ng exports VMs in standard formats that import into Fabric as volumes. Sites with a SAN often keep XCP-ng for those workloads and place new, storage-heavy or tenant-facing workloads on Fabric.

See migration use cases
FAQ

Fabric vs XCP-ng: common questions

Not by default. XCP-ng is a hypervisor; hyperconverged storage comes from XOSTOR, a separately supported layer, or from external shared storage. Fabric pools every node’s disks into policy-driven distributed storage as the base product.

More comparisons

How Fabric stacks up against the rest.

Fabric vs VMware VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)Fabric vs Proxmox Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE)Fabric vs Nutanix Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) with the AHV hypervisorFabric vs Scale Computing Scale Computing SC//Platform (HyperCore)Fabric vs VergeIO VergeOS by VergeIOFabric vs Harvester Harvester HCI (SUSE Virtualization)Fabric vs Azure Local Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI) All comparisons → Methodology and the full list

Try the whole platform free.

Community is unlimited nodes, every feature, forever. Move to a paid class when you want the production update channel and a support contract.