@deadman2141

I'm realizing what is happening. After the memory install the system would not boot up, the bios flags the change and forces you to go through the bios setup with a hardware change. My system runs headless so I did not pick this up. After plugging a monitor in I see that message, go into bios and then through the boot sequence. This is when I notice that the system "hangs" after that statement. What I just realized is that xo lite was responding (along with pings) while the system was hung. I pass the GPU to a VM, so once dom0 gets to a certain point the GPU goes away, leaving the monitor stuck, but the system boots just fine.

@deadman2141

I'm realizing what is happening. After the memory install the system would not boot up, the bios flags the change and forces you to go through the bios setup with a hardware change. My system runs headless so I did not pick this up. After plugging a monitor in I see that message, go into bios and then through the boot sequence. This is when I notice that the system "hangs" after that statement. What I just realized is that xo lite was responding (along with pings) while the system was hung. I pass the GPU to a VM, so once dom0 gets to a certain point the GPU goes away, leaving the monitor stuck, but the system boots just fine.

I'm a bit stumped, after installing 64GB RAM (additional 4x16 sticks) XCP is stuck booting (just after the dom0 message EFI_MEMMAP is not enabled). It boots fine in safe mode, but in safe mode XOA won't start (perhaps by design? error is not enough PCPUS). I don't really know where to start with understanding what might be going on, so far the kern.log and deamon.log don' t show errors. Where should I look?

@Andrew
Ok, thanks I will give that a try.

I have been troubleshooting my 8.3 install for a few days.
After realizing that the motherboard SAS controller may be failing I am using the sata ports on the motherboard, which seems to have worked.
I ran the host without any VMs for over 24 hours with no issues. Then I started XOA and after another 24 hours everything working great. Then I started a debianVM (bookworm) and the system went down. The host shell started giving Input/Output errors on every command, and the two VMs were hung with disk errors on their xvda devices (a different ssd than the system ssd).
journalctl shows the journal stopped a couple of days ago, but /var/logs has only 8% usage so there is plenty of disk space.
I would appreciate any insight on where I might look to try to troubleshoot this. I did an fsck on the root partition and it cleared an orphaned inode, but I don't know what that means.
Dell diagnostics long test repeatedly comes back with no errors, so I think the memory is fine. Could the controller issue mean that even the SATA ports are suspect? I would hope that the diagnostics would tell me that but perhaps it is intermittent and only after running for a while.
A reboot (forced shutdown by holding down the power button) fsck of the sr (through /dev/mapper) shows no issues on the SR, but the VM consoles did show IO errors on their xvdaN disks from that SR.
What else can I do?

@Danp oh yes you are right . . . boot is 500GB and SR is 4TB, though I removed the hardware mirror and am just using the 2 4TB drives so I have a SR of close to 8TB. I think my problem has been that the hardware raid was not working well with XCP, and I also was trying to use some older samsung SSDs (also 500GB) both of which did fail a long test in the system diagnostics. So I have removed both of them from the machine and will see how things work now (after yet another reinstall because I was not having luck getting XCP to see the second 4TB HDD after removing the HW mirror).

@stevezemlicka Thanks . . . I do want to be able to use vnc to connect to the VM from my laptop and have the graphical desktop there. But through XOA/ XOlite I just want a user shell. I suppose that I should just not use the console at all in this case.

@Danp Thanks, I do have two install images stored in a local iso storage repository. I should have plenty of space, as my boot drive is 500MB and my overall default storage repository is 4GB. I have removed the hardware mirror, and perhaps this will help. I'll also review the logs as you suggest.

Re: XCP-NG Host stuck in read-only mode

Clean install of XCP-ng 8.3 (multiple attempts, I believe that I'm on the fourth try on a third boot disk). Dell Precision T7910, 2x4GB mirrored HDD (hardware raid, motherboard SAS HBA). Samsung EVO 870 SSD for boot , 32 GB RAM, 1 xenon CPU with 24 virtual CPUs (12 cores@ 2 threads maybe?).

This time, getting XOA installed from XO lite works great, it connects to the host after I put in the name/ IP (static), and I create a debian 12.0.9 VM.

Debian install done, VM is running after a reboot, I can log in to a shell and poke around, and install the XCP guest utilities from the ISO provided on the host. Another reboot, everything seems good, I go to bed.

This morning I'm going to backup the database and do a vm snapshot so that if I need to reinstall (again) I can get back running more quickly. Got into the system console directly on the host (not ssh), start a shell, and cannot make a directory in /mnt (read only filesystem error).

I am about to give up. I had Xen Debian running on this hardware for years with no issues (after I hacked it to get around the UEFI boot which took me a few frustrating hours/ days) which was the basis of my home lab. Xen project seems now to have upgraded and XCP seemed like the right direction to go, but rather than upgrade I backed up all of the important config/ user stuff in my DebianVM and started over. I want to virtualize TrueNAS by passing a PCI HBA directly to it, and have had that working on previous attempts until the XCP system starts to fail. I figure it's a disk error but it is happening now over multiple ssd boot disks. XOA seems to be stable, it is the host system that ends up failing every time. So I think my hardware raid is not the problem as this is the only SR for VMs.

System diagnostics from the BIOS yield no problems (disks, memory, PCI bus all green lights).

Any thoughts before I scrap XCP and look to something else? Or any suggestions for what else to try? Proxmox comes to mind, but I've heard it will auto mount ZFS pools even on passthrough so could be trouble for TrueNAS virtualization.

@olivierlambert

I now have my debianVM running, and in both XO lite and XOA the console is a vnc/ desktop instead of a shell interface. While it's not a huge problem, I'm surprised by it. Is there a way to instead have the console be a simple shell interface?

@olivierlambert

I'll try XO too, I think it had the same connection as XOA but right now the VM wont start so something is wrong with the storage repository I'm guessing. Once I get it started again I'll check to see if XO has a shell for the console rather than graphic interface.