[CentOS] Xen VMs: regular filesystem corruption

Kai Schaetzl maillists at conactive.com
Sat Oct 13 15:06:45 UTC 2007


Stephen John Smoogen wrote on Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:37:51 -0600:

> I have not seen this... and my setup seems similar to yours. I have
> been building and rebuilding xen boxes, rebooting and running them
> quite a bit. I would first suspect dodgy hardware.

Definitely not. It's only the VMs that have a problem, not the main system 
and when it happens the whole VM filesystem file is just gone (well, it is 
there, but only 24 KB or so). It seems that Xen sometimes doesn't write 
the filesystem file when the system shuts itself down or reboots. Or it 
doesn't really create the filesystem at installation time, so there is 
nothing to reboot to. 
When you use files for storing the VM, do you *un*check the "Allocate 
entire virtual disk now" option? I do as I'm currently setting up quite a 
few for testing and rolling out all the space would restrict me in the 
number of test files I can have. But I always make sure that there is 
enough disk space in case the VM needs the full capacity. I think sparse 
files are used for that, maybe there lies the problem?
Obviously, the possibility I can loose a complete VM doesn't make it very 
reliable :-( Apart from this problem the VMs work for me just nicely.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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