Unexpected VM autostart behavior on pool reboot
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I want to make sure it's not my expectations that are off.
I'm running XO from source and it's up to date, currently commit 0603b.
I came in on a Sunday because there were 44 patches released for xcp-ng. I did the pool update so it updated all three hosts in my pool (Pool Master, Server A and Server B). Then I shut down all the VMs except the one VM running XO. The VM running XO is not on the Pool Master, it's on Server B. I do not have shared storage so I did not want to do a rolling pool reboot.
I rebooted Pool Master. When it came back up and the VMs it ran started to come up, I rebooted Server A. Then I switched to an XO instance (also from source and also current) that isn't running on any xcp host and I used it to shut down the XO instance running on Server B. Soon after I did that, two of the VMs on Server B booted back up. Both of those VMs are set to auto-start.
First question: Did those VMs likely start because the pool master had restarted so it was dutifully restarting the auto-start VMs that weren't running? Or maybe the pool master reboot caused Server B's toolstack to restart which auto-started the VMs?
Then I shut those auto-started VMs down again then waited for the XO instance on Server B to shut down, it was taking quite a while for some reason. Then using the separate XO instance I rebooted Server B.
After Server B booted up, none of the three VMs with auto-start set started automatically. I thought maybe there was a delay for some reason so I waited about 5 minutes but those VMs didn't start.
Second question: Is that expected behavior because the pool master is really in charge of restarting VMs or was it because I had manually shut them down before the reboot so they were trying to maintain that same state?
In retrospect I think I should have used the non-xcp-hosted instance of XO to do all of this stuff so I could have shut down all the VMs then performed a pool reboot without it trying to manually migrate a VM between machines. The all three hosts would have rebooted at the same time and maybe that would have been better.
I have a fairly small infrastructure so I manage that kind of stuff manually and a migration for the remaining VM would have taken a long time. I think this is only my second or third time to patch xcp so I'm still learning the best way to handle it.