One VM forcibly restarts

richiebyte

Hi,

I am a new user of XCP-ng and so far, my experience has been great! I have been a long-time user of XenServer but stopped updating the hypervisor when Citrix crippled the free version. I randomly came across XCP-ng and I couldn’t believe my eyes, how I hadn’t come across this sooner!

My server is for personal use at home, with a few VM’s and host a website for free for a local youth charity. It is great to once again, have a hypervisor that is current and not a gigantic back-door!

Anyway, to the problem… today, I experienced a strange problem that I can’t seem to find a reason for and I ended up deleting the problematic VM before thinking of trying to capture some logs beforehand. I had a Windows 10 VM that the hypervisor was forcing a reboot of. When using it, the console would just go blank and then a few seconds later, the VM would turn back on and start booting back into Windows. This kept repeating, where it would only stay on for a minute or two?

I even tried attaching the virtual disk from the VM, to another VM and it didn’t power-cycle. I then created a new virtual disk on the problematic VM and every time I tried to boot it into the Windows ISO, it would force restart to the point I couldn’t even get it to boot from the ISO any more. I ended up deleting the VM, I know I should have tried to get the logs beforehand, but I just wondered if anybody may have an idea of what might have been the cause of this?

I am just a little paranoid that hardware is starting to fail, hopefully not.
One last thing, I have been trialling Xen Orchestra and it’s fantastic! Such an improvement from Citrix XenCenter. I was wondering if there is a licence option available for people who only use the product for personal use / hosting for charities?

I realise this is quite a lengthy post, apologies haha!

Cheers,
Richie

olivierlambert

Hello @richiebyte

Glad you finally found XCP-ng And wait to discover you can use XO from the sources with all XO features for free, as it's fully Open Source: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/installation.html#from-the-sources

XOA (the turnkey virtual machine/appliance) is meant to be sold to companies. As a home labber, it's fine to use the version from the sources

edit: to answer your original question, it's hard to tell, do you still have the issue with a fresh new VM running on Windows?

richiebyte

Hi @olivierlambert

That's perfect, thank you, I'll check that out!

In regards to the problematic VM, it only happened to this single VM. With a new fresh VM, with the virtual disk from the problematic VM, seems to be working. I just found it really strange as I created a new VM using the exact same settings, with the original virtual disk. The only thing I did yesterday to this VM was install Citrix' guest tools 9.3.1 (I have this installed on other VM's and they're working OK, although the other VM's are Windows Server 2019/2022). That's the only change that I had made.

Cheers,
Richie

olivierlambert

So since you installed the Citrix tools it started to reboot, right?

richiebyte

On this one VM yeah, all other VM's have been fine with the Citrix tools. I am not sure if the tools change anything on the VM level once installed, as the problem did continue after attaching a fresh blank virtual disk to the problem VM.