Adding new host to pool failed

[nick.lloyd]

@tony Just to make sure, these are 8.2.1 hosts, or just 8.2? Also, can you run xe host-all-editions on one of the hosts? I'm sure this command may help too, but someone with more experience than me can chime in on that.

Never mind, this is actually what you should run (for real, probably)
host-license-remove [host-uuid=host_uuid]

[tony]

@nick-lloyd Which host should run remove the license from? The new host or the master of the pool?

I checked both hosts with host-license-view and they have the same output:

restrict_vswitch_controller            : false
                           restrict_lab: false
                         restrict_stage: false
                   restrict_storagelink: false
     restrict_storagelink_site_recovery: false
               restrict_web_selfservice: false
       restrict_web_selfservice_manager: false
                  restrict_hotfix_apply: false
          restrict_export_resource_data: false
                  restrict_read_caching: false
                          restrict_cifs: false
                  restrict_health_check: false
                           restrict_xcm: false
       restrict_vm_memory_introspection: false
            restrict_batch_hotfix_apply: false
            restrict_management_on_vlan: false
                      restrict_ws_proxy: false
                          restrict_vlan: false
                           restrict_qos: false
         restrict_pool_attached_storage: false
                        restrict_netapp: false
                     restrict_equalogic: false
                       restrict_pooling: false
                             enable_xha: true
                      restrict_marathon: false
                restrict_email_alerting: false
        restrict_historical_performance: false
                           restrict_wlb: false
                          restrict_rbac: false
                           restrict_dmc: false
                    restrict_checkpoint: false
                   restrict_cpu_masking: false
                    restrict_connection: false
                        platform_filter: false
                     regular_nag_dialog: false
                          restrict_vmpr: false
                          restrict_vmss: false
                  restrict_intellicache: false
                           restrict_gpu: false
                            restrict_dr: false
                   restrict_vif_locking: false
            restrict_storage_xen_motion: false
                          restrict_vgpu: false
    restrict_integrated_gpu_passthrough: false
                           restrict_vss: false
       restrict_guest_agent_auto_update: false
    restrict_pci_device_for_auto_update: false
                    restrict_xen_motion: false
              restrict_guest_ip_setting: false
                            restrict_ad: false
                   restrict_nested_virt: false
                 restrict_live_patching: false
         restrict_set_vcpus_number_live: false
                     restrict_pvs_proxy: false
                 restrict_igmp_snooping: false
                           restrict_rpu: false
                     restrict_pool_size: false
                           restrict_cbt: false
               restrict_usb_passthrough: false
                 restrict_network_sriov: false
                      restrict_corosync: true
                   restrict_zstd_export: false
          restrict_pool_secret_rotation: false

[nick.lloyd]

@tony It shouldn't matter since the hosts are in the same pool, it should list both of them. You can run it against both hosts to be sure

[tony]

@nick-lloyd They are not in the same pool yet, because of the error above, the new host cannot be added to the pool. I ran the host-license-remove command on the new host and still the same thing, the result of the host-license-view remains unchanged.

[tony]

More information, both are XCP-ng 8.2.1, I ran the host-all-editions command and both returns just xcp-ng

[nick.lloyd]

@tony Huh, interesting... What hardware is in each of the hosts? And can you double check that you're running similar-ish firmware/bios on both servers?

[tony]

@nick-lloyd They are both xeon but around 4 generations apart, how do I check if they are compatible? I have successfully added a non xeon with a xeon to the same pool before (there were warnings that some feature set will be disabled) so I thought this should be fine too, but please let me know otherwise.

[nick.lloyd]

@tony That should be fine, are you adding the older host to the newer host's pool, or vice-versa? My guess is that the newer one needs to be added to the older server's pool so that it can "properly" mask the CPU features

[nick.lloyd]

@tony And again, double check the BIOS updates. There may be a bug fix in one of them for Xen

[tony]

@nick-lloyd The new host is has new CPU, the old host already in the pool has older CPU. I will try to update the BIOS of the new host and see if it helps. I don't think the old host will have any updates.

[tony]

Updating the BIOS of the new host made no differences. So I tried to add it to my test pool and what do you know, it works without any issue and the test pool has a master of even older CPU so I don't think its compatibility issue.

There must be something wrong with my main pool that I'm trying to add the new host to.

[tony]

Ok figured it out at the end using xe pool-list on the existing pool gives me a list of existing hosts on the pool, and there was one that has been taken offline, without detaching in XO. So I did a xe host-forget uuid=<host uuid> because xe pool-eject doesn't work on offline host. And now I can add the new host just fine. Thanks everyone for helping!