Heads-up: XenServer offload compositing requires premium hypervisor licences

[Stephen Borrill]

A quick heads-up that you need to have your hypervisor pool licensed with premium features (Hypervisor Standard is not good enough) in order to successfully use Offload Compositing. The reason is that, for some reason, when ELM tries to create the compositing VM it attempts to force on has-vendor-device, i.e. "Able to receive updates from Windows Update". Seeing as you are never going to be running Windows Update on the compositing VM this is completely pointless. However, as it is a premium feature in the hypervisor, it means that the VM creation will fail as follows:

 

XenErrorCategory { Message = "LICENCE_RESTRICTION PCI_device_for_auto_update", Name = "Async.VM.set_has_vendor_device", Description = "" }

 

This is the equivalent of the following command-line operation:

 

# xe vm-param-set uuid=f18e6a88-5207-e654-c136-79ed5ea00700 has-vendor-device=true
This operation is not allowed because your license lacks a needed feature. Please contact your support representative.
feature: PCI_device_for_auto_update