Xen Server Crashing When DomU's Start

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Environment

SLES 10 SP2 - 2.6.16.60-0.27-xen, x86_64 kernel

Situation

After a power outage and a hard reboot of SLES Xen host server, upon loading of any DomU on the Xen host server, both the DomU and the Host machine would hard lock and crash. The only way to get the server operational again was to power off and back on.

Looking at the /var/log/xen/xend.log, it shows these errors:

Xend died due to signal 11! Restarting it

...

XendConfigError: Invalid Configuration: memory_dynamic_max must be greater than zero

Looking at the xm list -l output, all the DomU's information seemed to be in order, especially the memory configuration. They all had assigned at least 1 Gb or more of RAM.

Resolution

At the host console, enter:

xm list -l vm_name> filename

where vm_name is the name of the virtual machine you want to modify and filename is whatever you want to name the text file. You can look at the file itself just to verify that everything is there.

Then, using either the GUI virtmanager (from Yast2) or typing 'xm delete vm_name', delete the same vm from the xend database. This is not deleting the actual disks of the vm. It is just removing the record from the xend database.

Then run this:

xm new -F filename

where filename is the above file that was just created.

That will basically re-import the machine into the xend database with the same settings it had previsouly, and clear up any corruption, if there is any. Again, the configurations looked fine and in order, but after doing this, the DomU's were able to load and run just fine.

Disclaimer

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