CPU pegged at 100% in several Rocky Linux 8 VMs without workload in guest

[laszlobortel]

@aflons @jgrafton First of all, I would like to thank very much both of you for replying so quickly to this old thread!
Our failure rate is roughly 1 frozen VM / 90 Rocky8 VMs / day, which is not tolerable. We have further hundreds of Rocky8 VMs on VMware, waiting for migration to XCP-ng.
I tried to summarise our options:

• Our kernels are pretty fresh, but we can try the very latest available for Rocky 8.
• Upgrading to Rocky 9 on the sort term is not an option. We have to migrate Rocky 8 from VMware to XCP-ng first, then we can think about switching to Rocky 9 later.
• VMware tools removed during migration as part of the migration procedure.
• We are aready on shared lvmohba storage, which is a production grade Hitachi Vantara all SSD, same as under VMware, so I see no room for change/improvement here.
• As last resort we can try disable load-balancing plugin and reboot monthly during our maintenance window, but this would be an ugly workaround.

Is there anything I forgot?

@jgrafton Was there any useful suggestion or conclusion in your Vates support ticket #7726289? I am afraid that we are facing a tricky interworking issue between the xen hypervisor and the 4.18.0 kernel and both components are independent from XCP-ng and Vates.

[aflons]

@laszlobortel yes I definately think load balancing is the issue for you. Since live migrations is the biggest trigger.

[olivierlambert]

That would be an interesting lead to see if the issue is triggered by live migrations, this could be a hint on the issue.

[DustinB]

@laszlobortel While I can understand "Upgrading not being an option" you're lift and shifting the workload (or at least have been attempting to do this to date).

Are you unable to build new and migrate data over to XCP-ng, while I could see this causing more work, lift and shifting is almost always a guaranteed way to cause headaches - like the ones you're experiencing.

That is why each service provider recommends building new if you can. At the same time that you're building new, you're updating which of course can cause issues - but continuing to run Rocky8 is only receiving security updates until 2029. Sure it has a few years left, but why not take the opportunity to upgrade?

[john.c]

@DustinB said:

@laszlobortel While I can understand "Upgrading not being an option" you're lift and shifting the workload (or at least have been attempting to do this to date).

Are you unable to build new and migrate data over to XCP-ng, while I could see this causing more work, lift and shifting is almost always a guaranteed way to cause headaches - like the ones you're experiencing.

That is why each service provider recommends building new if you can. At the same time that you're building new, you're updating which of course can cause issues - but continuing to run Rocky8 is only receiving security updates until 2029. Sure it has a few years left, but why not take the opportunity to upgrade?

They can possibly go up to Rocky 9 but Rocky 10 later may be harder, as it requires a higher baseline on the CPU. Also they may have legacy software that only works on Rocky 8.

[jgrafton]

@laszlobortel We concluded that older Linux kernels plus live migrations plus lvmohba storage seems to trigger the issue. Our workaround was to upgrade to a mainline 6.x kernel packaged by ElRepo https://elrepo.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start for Rocky 8 systems that were especially prone to the CPU hang.

The kernel upgrades effectively stopped the issue from occurring.

[olivierlambert]

@jgrafton said:

@laszlobortel We concluded that older Linux kernels plus live migrations plus lvmohba storage seems to trigger the issue. Our workaround was to upgrade to a mainline 6.x kernel packaged by ElRepo https://elrepo.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start for Rocky 8 systems that were especially prone to the CPU hang.

The kernel upgrades effectively stopped the issue from occurring.

That's ultra helpful interesting @jgrafton

Maybe it's even worth a KB/known issue in our official doc, let me ping @thomas-dkmt

I suppose https://docs.xcp-ng.org/troubleshooting/common-problems/ might be the right place to document it.

[laszlobortel]

@DustinB I wrote "Upgrading to Rocky 9 on the short term is not an option." Please let me explain why! We are a telco with layered operation model: our team is responsible for virtualisation (VMware/Broadcom, Hyper-V, XCP-ng), another team is responsible for OS operation. The IaaS team is tasked with VMware exit, which means that we must migrate hundreds of VMs from VMware to XCP-ng as quick as possible this year, unchanged, with "lift-and-shift" method. It is a requirement that a VM which runs on VMware should run on XCP-ng, preferably unchanged. Even a simple kernel upgrade causes some delay in our migration plan. We can propose to the OS team that they should migrate to Rocky9, and they might consider and schedule it but it will not happen immediately.
Apart from this organisational reason my experience tells that while upgrading to Rocky9 would most probably solve this issue it would raise others (probably in docker/kubernetes layer or in application layer).

[laszlobortel]

@jgrafton I am a bit confused with the role of lvmohba storage in triggering this problem, because @aflons stated above (back in 2024) that "Seems to happen far less now with shared storage."
It is not clear for me if shared storage helps to solve the problem or makes it worse? Or lvmohba is a special kind of "bad" shared storage in this aspect?
In any case lvmohba is a fixed point in our architecture, that we cannot replace. I am just curious if we should experiment with another type of storage to rule out or confirm the contribution of lvmohba in this problem.

[laszlobortel]

We have checked our kernel versions, some are very old:

     10  4.18.0-553.109.1.el8_10.x86_64
      3  4.18.0-553.117.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.120.1.el8_10.x86_64
      4  4.18.0-553.16.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.22.1.el8_10.x86_64
     12  4.18.0-553.30.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.34.1.el8_10.x86_64
      4  4.18.0-553.36.1.el8_10.x86_64
      1  4.18.0-553.40.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.47.1.el8_10.x86_64
      3  4.18.0-553.51.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.54.1.el8_10.x86_64
      3  4.18.0-553.56.1.el8_10.x86_64
      1  4.18.0-553.58.1.el8_10.x86_64
      4  4.18.0-553.62.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.63.1.el8_10.x86_64
      3  4.18.0-553.69.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.74.1.el8_10.x86_64
      1  4.18.0-553.81.1.el8_10.x86_64
      1  4.18.0-553.83.1.el8_10.x86_64
      2  4.18.0-553.87.1.el8_10.x86_64
     16  4.18.0-553.89.1.el8_10.x86_64
      4  4.18.0-553.94.1.el8_10.x86_64

The OS team will do the kernel upgrade and I will come back with the result. Versions .109, .117, .120 did not fail yet in our environment. We have high hopes!