[Xen-users] Guest not starting after hardware migration

[Paul Stimpson <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I've suddenly been told I need to qualify the current Xen platform I'm building on some other hardware for our internal use and I'm having a hard time. I'd really appreciate your help.

The platform is an HP DL-180 server (Quad core Xeon E5620 @2.4GHz) and the machine I've been asked to show-horn the install into is a Dell R210 (Quad core Xeon X3430 @2.4GHz). I know the X3430 isn't as hot as the E5620 particularly in the cache department. They both appear to have VT-x and VT-d but I don't think the X3430 has Vpro. I'm not sure if the chipset on the Dell is likely to be deficient in any other way.

The install is an Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Xen 4.2 hypervisor with a 12.04 64-bit guest and a Windows Server 2008 R2-64 guest. There is a single ext2 partition (sda1) on the main drive that contains the host's /boot and all the other partitions are contained in an LVM VG (sda5). A single PCI card is passed through to the Windows guest using VT-d.

The first of my woes was that I couldn't put the Clonezilla image onto the Dell as it contains an LVM volume group, drive on the Dell is smaller than the HP and Clonezilla says it can't resize the volume. I did a dd copy of each of the individual partitions and LVM volumes on one of the HP boxes. I created a partition table on the Dell and made an sda1 and sda5. I created all the LVs and dd'd the contents into them.

I did find I'd miscalculated the size of sda1 and had trimmed off the end (which should have been empty) so used cp -a to move the files out, reformatted the FS then put them back. I booted the machine on a boot cd, chroot mounted the host fs and installed grub. The machine booted but I found I had to play with the udev network rules and grub.cfg to make everything mount and for the network devices to be recognised. I also doctored all the guest conf files to reference the correct PCI card and remove any references to individual CPU bindings.

The machine looks like it boots OK and the host and Linux guest start fine. The Windows VM steadfastly refuses to boot and if I do an xl create on it, I get the following messages:

libxl: error: libxl_create.c:420:libxl_domain_make: domain creation fail
libxl: error: libxl_create.c:646:initiate_domain_create: cannot make domain: -3
libxl: error: libxl.c:1392:libxl__destroy_domid: non-existant domain -1
libxl: error: libxl.c:1356:domain_destrpy_callback: unable to destroy guest with domid 4294967295
libxl: error: libxl_create.c:1152:domcreate_destruction_cb: unable to destroy domain 4294967295 following failed creation

These errors don't seem to contain any useful information to me (the original error displayed concerned failing to allocate memory but I put more RAM in the Dell and that went away)

I can't find any /var/log/xen entries for the Windows guest indicating why it was destroyed. There's nothing in kern.log either indicating a problem. I can mount the Windows guest's file system on the host. I see files and I don't see anything that is obviously corrupt.

Has anyone else tried to move installs between hardware please? I'd really appreciate any help you could give me in working out why this isn't working.

Thanks,
Paul.

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