[SOLVED] Windows 10 VM fails to start on every other attempt

[deflin]

Hi all. I'm brand new to Proxmox and playing around with it in my home lab.

I have a win10 vm that fails to stay started on every other invocation of the start command:

1. Start VM. VM completes startup. Shutdown within VM.
2. Start VM. VM starts then quickly dies.
3. Start VM. VM completes startup. Shutdown within VM.
4. Start VM. VM starts then quickly dies.
5. ...

This occurs both by starting the VM from the webapp as well as the command line. There is no additional text (failure or otherwise) starting from the command line.

/var/log/syslog has the same output from both successful and failed executions, so no major help there. It did contain a link to the start task log under /var/log/pxe. That file only contains the text TASK OK. I get the sense that the start procedure is working just fine and the actual VM is crashing quickly afterwards.

This behavior is not exhibited on the test lubuntu instance I created.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for digging deeper into this issue? Is there a set of logs I should be looking at? A way to increase granularity of logging? An in-depth troubleshooting guide?

 

[tom]

You run latest version? Please post the output of:

> pveversion -v

 

[GadgetPig]

Hi Deflin,

Check you are using the correct repository before doing "apt update && apt dist-upgrade". By default PVE uses enterprise repo. So if you did not purchase a support license, use "Proxmox VE No-Subscription Repository"

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Package_Repositories

You will need to make changes to 2 files:

/etc/apt/sources.list

and also comment out enterprise repo found under

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list

 

[deflin]

You run latest version? Please post the output of:

> pveversion -v

I used the latest version installer from the website: 5.1-722cc488-1

root@pve:~# pveversion -v
proxmox-ve: 5.1-25 (running kernel: 4.13.4-1-pve)
pve-manager: 5.1-35 (running version: 5.1-35/722cc488)
pve-kernel-4.13.4-1-pve: 4.13.4-25
libpve-http-server-perl: 2.0-6
lvm2: 2.02.168-pve6
corosync: 2.4.2-pve3
libqb0: 1.0.1-1
pve-cluster: 5.0-15
qemu-server: 5.0-17
pve-firmware: 2.0-3
libpve-common-perl: 5.0-20
libpve-guest-common-perl: 2.0-13
libpve-access-control: 5.0-7
libpve-storage-perl: 5.0-16
pve-libspice-server1: 0.12.8-3
vncterm: 1.5-2
pve-docs: 5.1-12
pve-qemu-kvm: 2.9.1-2
pve-container: 2.0-17
pve-firewall: 3.0-3
pve-ha-manager: 2.0-3
ksm-control-daemon: 1.2-2
glusterfs-client: 3.8.8-1
lxc-pve: 2.1.0-2
lxcfs: 2.0.7-pve4
criu: 2.11.1-1~bpo90
novnc-pve: 0.6-4
smartmontools: 6.5+svn4324-1
zfsutils-linux: 0.7.2-pve1~bpo90

Hi Deflin,

Check you are using the correct repository before doing "apt update && apt dist-upgrade". By default PVE uses enterprise repo. So if you did not purchase a support license, use "Proxmox VE No-Subscription Repository"

Updated to non-sub repo. Here is version information. Problem persists.

root@pve:~# pveversion -v
proxmox-ve: 5.1-31 (running kernel: 4.13.13-1-pve)
pve-manager: 5.1-40 (running version: 5.1-40/ea05b379)
pve-kernel-4.13.4-1-pve: 4.13.4-26
pve-kernel-4.13.13-1-pve: 4.13.13-31
libpve-http-server-perl: 2.0-8
lvm2: 2.02.168-pve6
corosync: 2.4.2-pve3
libqb0: 1.0.1-1
pve-cluster: 5.0-19
qemu-server: 5.0-18
pve-firmware: 2.0-3
libpve-common-perl: 5.0-25
libpve-guest-common-perl: 2.0-14
libpve-access-control: 5.0-7
libpve-storage-perl: 5.0-17
pve-libspice-server1: 0.12.8-3
vncterm: 1.5-3
pve-docs: 5.1-12
pve-qemu-kvm: 2.9.1-5
pve-container: 2.0-18
pve-firewall: 3.0-5
pve-ha-manager: 2.0-4
ksm-control-daemon: 1.2-2
glusterfs-client: 3.8.8-1
lxc-pve: 2.1.1-2
lxcfs: 2.0.8-1
criu: 2.11.1-1~bpo90
novnc-pve: 0.6-4
smartmontools: 6.5+svn4324-1
zfsutils-linux: 0.7.3-pve1~bpo9

I going to enable boot logging in the VM and see if that provides any valuable diagnostic information.

 

[deflin]

Nothing is added to the bootlog for the failed boot attempts. During boot it gets to the point it displays the blue windows logo for about half a second and then crashes so not sure it has time to write to the boot log.

Note that reboots work fine. I'm not familiar with the KVM lifecycle but a reasonable guess is the environment generated on VM startup is off somehow.

 

[deflin]

I went ahead and did a new install and followed the Win10 Best Practices. Currently I cannot replicate the issue with the new VM. I hadn't thought to do that since I've only used these in the past on KVM for performance reasons and not functionality. Perhaps it was just a bad install. In any case, I consider this resolved. Thanks!

 

[GadgetPig]

Thanks for the update deflin, please don't forget to change the subject line to [solved]. In case this happens again in future, you can try disabling Windows 10 hibernate function as well as "fast boot", to see if they might affect booting. cheers!

 

[deflin]

Follow-up. I've started migrating VMs from my KVM server into the Proxmox cluster. Migration of Centos nodes has gone smoothly. Migrating the existing Windows 10 VM, not so much!

The same issue of the VM failing to start every other time popped up again. I downloaded and installed the latest stable virtio drivers. This is what seemed to fix the issue last time but it did nothing this time around. I followed @GadgetPig advice for disabling hibernate and fast boot. That seems to have done the trick this time around.

I did a bit of testing with some new win10 VMs. I setup two instances, the first with an ide hard disk and the second with a scsi disk.

IDE:
- Drive recognized without virtio drivers. No suitable virtio drivers could be found for the block devices.
- VM experiences the fail on boot every other time issue.
- Removed all other IDE devices (cdrom). Did not help.

SCSI:
- Drive not recognized without virtio drivers. Suitable virtio drivers found for the block devices and installed.
- VM does not experience fail on every other boot.

Perhaps something to do with the IDE block device. I'm not going to research any deeper at this point but hopefully this information can be useful to any others that experience the same issue.