VM cannot be migrated after NICs of one host died

hansve

HI,

I have 2 host in a pool with VMs distributed amongst them. Today first the NICs in one host (not the pool master) died and then the entire server became unstable (not always booting, but when it boots, it doesn't have any NIC).

The problem is that I cannot migrate the VMs which running on that host or even restart the VMs again on the pool host because it thinks they are still running.
The VM disks are on shared storage.

How can I get these VMs to start on the pool master?

thanks
Hans

Danp

Hi,

Try running the following command on your pool master for each VM that you are unable to start --

xe vm-reset-powerstate vm=vm_name -force

This will reset the power state so that you can start the VM on the remaining host.

Regards,
Dan

nick.lloyd

@hansve Since you have shared storage, you should be able to use the "Start on..." feature under the Advanced tab of the VM. That should let you start it on any of the hosts. I'm curious if it will work though because your NIC isn't being detected. You may have to get a USB Ethernet adapter to try and get it to move.

The other option would be to forget the VMs if you can (similar to VMware's "remove from inventory" option). Then create a VM without any disks attached to it, then add the already existing disk to the VM and start it.

I suppose you could do both of them as well. You'd get a USB NIC so you can have networking to the pool (as not to screw with the XAPI DB), then unregister the VMs, create shell VMs, attach disks, then start.

If none of these work, let me know!

hansve

@Danp

I was able to reset the power state, but when I wanted to start it on the remaining host, it returned an error:

SR_BACKEND_FAILURE_46(, The VDI is not available [opterr=['HOST_OFFLINE', 'OpaqueRef:34e590d8-19ab-eb89-af81-5eead08952d1']], )

Apparently there were still locks on the disk, so I looked up the uuid and removed it from the pool database

xe vdi-forget uuid=....

Next I gave it a new name, attached it to the VM and was able to restart the VM.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction !

Danp

@hansve You're welcome.