VM’s Slow booting
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Hello.
I have been proxmox user for years , but I recently noticed the increasing interest on xcp-ng (specially by home lab enthusiasts) so I decided to give it a go.
So far the experience hasn’t been the greatest to be honest. I migrated a few VMs from my old installation using clonezilla, but the they take a long time ( compared to promox) to boot. They are all Debian and Ubuntu legacy Bios machines and the stay for almost 30 seconds on loading initial ramdisk
Inhale a windows and another linux machine using EUFI and these boot fine. No noticeable difference from before ( maybe a tiny slower, but hey....).Hardware is exactly the same as proxmox ( a small intel nuc i7 8th gen with 32gb of ram )
I tried to create a new vm and install Debian using both Debian 10 template and other linux..... and same problem with initial ramdisk taking forever to load..( at some point i thought clonezilla had made something fishy).
Any idea what’s going on?? Is legacy bios on Xcp-ng a complete dump or what ?
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Hi!
Welcome here
Hmm I'm not aware of such problem on BIOS. I think I never experienced myself such a slow boot process
Does it ring any bell to anyone?
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@olivierlambert hi! Thank you.
Well. I’ve been googling around and watching some videos of xcp-ng and what thought was slow boot times are normal boot times for this hypervisor. I guess I was used to proxmox being much faster booting vms.
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I don't have such time myself to boot VMs
Maybe you are talking about the emulated BIOS boot time, be sure to have hard disk first in the boot order, maybe it's waiting for network boot. -
@olivierlambert hi, again!
Nah, as told before it’s on initramdisk. After loading grub. A Ubuntu test install I did freezes for almost 20 seconds there.
I do have some warnings when I boot xcp-ng regarding x-273 and x-297 .... would that cripple performance that much. ( consumer hardware )
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@bassopt did you ever work this out? seeing the same thing at the moment. and with a lot of time passed XCP has improved but I'm still seeing this same thing with debian 12.5
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Nobody reported the same behavior, so I assume it might be specific to a configuration combo or something like that. For example, if you use Cloudinit with DHCP, the VM could take up to 2 min to boot (while it's instant otherwise). So I'm not sure it's on XCP-ng from the start.
Let's get a bit more datapoint: how long it takes to boot after grub up to the moment you got the login screen?
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To give one datapoint here.
I booted a Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS VM using bios.
From grub hitting enter to boot to the login 11 sec.
Host: AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS 64GB RAM
VM VDI is on an NFS share connected through 2,5Gb Ethernet -
Ubuntu server or desktop?
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I haven’t used XCP-ng for a while , but the issues I had were similar. Around 10-12 secs from grub to prompt. Both in Debian or Ubuntu server. For some reason I remember the machines booted way faster using uefi than bios, so I always thought it was some odd issue with your bio’s implementation
I have a machine I can install xcp-ng to test … I’ll give it a go soon.
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@olivierlambert said in VM’s Slow booting:
Ubuntu server or desktop?
Sorry, I should have added that. Ubuntu Server it is. A short stop is always on Cloud Init - 2-4 sec.
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Well mini was on initramfs. Boot part. I never used cloud init for anything
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Cloudinit is loading many things, so I wouldn't be surprised it makes the boot longer. Can we check with a default/basic Ubuntu server install and give the timing?
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Installed a new 22.04.2 Server in default installation and removed cloud-init. Hitting enter in grub to login screen 6 sec. on the same host as noted above
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Let see in the community around if they have a similar experience. My impression is 6 seconds is relatively fine.
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@olivierlambert I have one Ubuntu server 22.04, fresh install and it has had this "slow" booting (black screen foir a few seconds) since the install. Doesn't bother me much. While all my Debian 12 boot instantly without this hang.
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Could this be the grub menu and it's wait timer? I had it once that I did no saw grub but the system bootet fine. In the end grub was the black screen and depending on the wait interval it stayed black.
This might be a thing with how the console handles image grabbing during boot
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@imaginapix Don't know enough of this. I only use debian and know my way around.
The ubuntu VM was just a test....Here is a video of the VM booting: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z7urjkcubq8vnjjbcs9nn/ScreenShot-2024-04-19-at-18.01.45.mov?rlkey=iufbqfqy7758pke3hsiv58zpt&dl=0
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@manilx I can tell you this is extremely dois compare to proxmox for exemple. My Debian VMs with one CORe on a i5-12400 boot in half of that time.
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Ubuntu 20-22 boot is slow by design. It may take 1-2min.
Debian or any rhel boot in 20sec.
