@olivierlambert shoutout to @danp that did a takeover of the incident ticket
he headed me the right way to resolution of the problem, my production pool is back up & running with its VMs.
there was indeed a diff between what was seen by "xl list"/"xenops-cli list" and what was seen by XOA in the web ui.
a couple "xl destroy pid" to destroy zombie VMs, and toolstack restarts later, all is now up.
I don't know how the hell a simple RPU did get me in this situation though...









