[PVE-User] Constant crashes with high IO load from FreeBSD guests

[Mykel at mWare.ca]

On 10-12-28 13:24, Myke G wrote:
> I have 3 SunFire X2200s in my cluster, with 8-16GB RAM, and 4 or 8 CPU 
> cores. I just upgraded one of them to v1.7, the rest are still running 
> v1.5. It doesn't seem to matter - the problem remains:
>
> If the guest fires up a tar of / or a particularly large ./configure 
> of something, eventually, within seconds to minutes, the Proxmox node 
> hangs. Usually there's no console messages, and I have to use the IPMI 
> interface to reset the machine. (I'm 500KM from the datacenter)
> We've tried FreeBSD 7 and 8, with SCSI and IDE, Realtek and Intel 
> NICs... no difference. We've only tried with i386 builds (stock from 
> ISO, and also updated to -STABLE). I've moved the guest around to 
> different nodes in the cluster, and the VM-IO-induced crashing is 
> universal. AFAIK the hardware is fine, the crashes follow this user's 
> workpatterns - which aren't exceptional IMO. We've recreated this 
> instance 4 times now I think.
>
> Sometimes, the guest machine just ends up being "stopped" in the 
> Proxmox management, but this is only about 1/20 occurrences. Even this 
> is undesirable, but nowhere near as bad as wiping out the hardware - 
> which is the typical mode of failure. I should add, sometimes the node 
> self-reboots...
>
> OpenVZ VMs seem to be fine, and I haven't struggled with Linux 
> machines running in QEMU... 32b WindowsXP occasionally caused some 
> problems like this, but that went away after v1.5. (Hey, I only use it 
> to manage unruly IE-Only Webapps!)

Given the near-complete lack of response, I'm not sure if anyone's 
interested in this problem... but...

We picked up a Xeon-based HP Proliant DL120 G6 and have been running 
stably for several days now, with 3 FreeBSD, one Linux and one WinXP 
instance on there.

So, so far the theory seems to bear out - KVM is not appropriate on 
2000-series Opterons.

Myke