Autostart behaviour after upgrade 8.2 -> 8.3

[dom0]

Hi everyone!

I've upgraded standalone host from 8.2 to 8.3 yesterday. On 8.2 I was using /etc/rc.local and vApps to autostart VM-s, it was working like a charm, especially since you can delay startup time which is quite handy if you have block based storage that needs long time to boot so you can delay boot of file server VM before the storage boots online for example.

After upgrading to 8.3 I've realized that rc.local + vApps method does not work any more, can someone confirm that?

I've found solution here: https://docs.xcp-ng.org/guides/autostart-vm/#with-the-cli , however since i was typing and not copy-pasting, instead of "xe pool-param-set uuid=<VM_UUID> other-config:auto_poweron=true" on the last part I typed in autopoweron:true, restarted and it does not work.

I typed it with colon (:) again and listed pool param list, then i saw two "autopoweron:true" flags with same value, i decided to type autopoweron:false, then i had 3 flags, two true and 1 false... Later on I realised that i had to use equals (=), so now autostart works.

Is this normal behaviour when using colon instead of equals sign? Please see picture attached:

Also, is there a way to add autostart delay to VMs?

Thanks!

[poddingue]

Hey, thanks for writing this up with the actual commands and the screenshot, that really helps.

Not sure why rc.local + vApps stopped working after your 8.2 to 8.3 jump. rc.local is more your own dom0-level script than something XCP-ng promises to keep stable across releases, so something underneath may well have shifted, but I can't point to what.

On the delay question, there does seem to be a per-VM "start-delay" parameter. I ran into it replying to a pretty similar issue a couple days ago, if you want to compare notes: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/12388. There are also the "appliance" CLI commands, the vApp equivalent, though from another recent thread it looked like nobody's fully sure how start order and delay actually interact there: https://xcp-ng.org/forum/topic/12149. So I think the capability is there, just not pulled together in one place.

The colon-vs-equals thing is interesting. I honestly don't know xe's map-param parsing well enough to say if that's expected or a rough edge. Maybe someone closer to the CLI internals can say whether it should just reject that instead of creating duplicate entries. Given how scattered this all is, might be worth flagging to @Team-Documentation-Knowledge-Management.

Hope some of that's useful, others probably know xe's internals better than me though.