@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.

I'm just getting used to xcp after having used xen debian previously and creating everything from dom0 cli. XOA is a huge upgrade, with the exception that I don't want to see a KDE or other desktop as the console for linux guests. I can set up my own VNC to give me that, what I want is a user shell as the console in XO/ XOA. Is there a way to do that?

@Danp it turns out I had a typo that took me forever to find . . . 102 vs 192 in the gateway ip. The strange thing to me was that the internal networking was working (pings, connections, etc). But there's something in the xoa web site that could not make the connection to the server it was running on, which makes me think there is some kind of external communication going on for server connections. If xoa can ping the dom0 then why would it need the gateway to connect to it for the web interface?

Anyway I fixed the typo after finding the error running ip monitor, and then everything works great. This was the 3rd or 4th install of xoa so I was getting a bit hurried . . . next morning it took 2 minutes to find the error. Now its registered and working.

I installed XOA from the command line, and set up a static ip. VM is running and I can get to the console from XO lite. When I run xoa check I get an error that xen-orchestra.net is unreachable. I can ping any address inside my lan up to and including the gateway. But pings outside the local network all fail (I tried a few like 8.8.8.8). The network is operating in bridge mode, and on dom0 I can ping everything so the physical network is working. Is there some way to verify that the bridge is set up correctly? Running ifconfig on dom0 shows that eth0 is up, and shows xenbr0 with the static IP I set for dom0. Do I need to set up new bridges for each vm? I'm not sure where to start on this, and would like to be able to register xoa and start spinning up the VMs I need running.