Optimize Xen

SUSE Product Topics SLES Virtualization
1

SLES 12 with 1 Xen VM (windows 2012). We are experiencing times of whole system freeze-up. Nothing works at this time. The mouse does move but you can not click on anything. Everything you click on during this time will open/run when the system “unfreezes”. These freeze-up times last up to 5 minutes. These freeze-up don’t seem to happen until i open virt-manager. So i will give you the specs of the physical server:

[LIST=1]
[]2 Quad core Xeons (8 cores total)
[]16GB RAM
[]2 SATA Drives in RAID 1 (750GB)
[]
[/LIST]

Specs of the Xen VM:

[LIST=1]
[]6 CPU’s
[]4GB RAM
[]120GB Hard drive
[]
[/LIST]

Not sure if this is useful or not; the java version is the version that comes with SLES12. The graph on virt-manager does not show the CPU on the VM or host as used highly. I looked in /var/log/libvirt and see nothing that applies to this issue. I also looked in /var/lib/libvirt/… and do not see anything related to this issue. How can i make sure the VM is optimized?

2

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3

Hi carnold6,

We are experiencing times of whole system freeze-up. Nothing works at this time. The mouse does move but you can not click on anything. Everything you click on during this time will open/run when the system “unfreezes”.

the freeze affects the base system (Dom0), too? Have you tried switching to a text console during the “freeze” and/or running “vmstat 1” in a console window during the “freeze”? Can you “ping” the machine during those times? How do you access the system, are you at a local graphical console or are you using a remote (X11?) connection?

Regards,
Jens

4

FWIW, we saw this exact same behavior during our initial SLES 12 testing with in-place upgrades to 12 64bit. The hosts were Xen with both Windows and SLES VM’s on similar era hardware - the entire host would lock up randomly just as you describe with nothing in the logs to indicate an issue. Some hosts contained doms that were all Windows, some were all SLES, some were mixed. We performed a clean install on the same hardware and there are no issues, except with networking (we think it was related to wicked). We decided to stick with SLES 11 in production until we have more time to test (and train) on 12.