Cannot create a new VM with VirtIO!

Submitted by drtester on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 21:36

Ran into a major snag tonight after updating a machine to Cloudmin 6.3. When I try to create a New Empty system, it will not boot the CD image if the hard drive is set to VirtIO. I am using LVM images for the VM's hard disk, maintained by Cloudmin. If I set the Disk Driver to regular IDE, it works.

This just broke with the update to 6.3. I had just created some VMs yesterday on the same machine with the VirtIO driver.

I've messed around with setting boot methods, nothing. Finally got a VM installed by creating it with the IDE driver, then removing the disk, adding another disk, changing it from /dev/hda to /dev/vda, and then it works.. but I'm not sure it really is using the faster disk driver.

This is a show-stopper!

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Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 05/28/2012 - 22:36

If you create a VM like this that doesn't boot properly, what is shown at Resources -> Manage Disks in the "File or device on host" and "Device on system" columns?

The CD-ROM drive should be IDE, but the main drive VirtIO.

Submitted by drtester on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 01:28

Hi Jamie,

It does show the correct resources - the HD as the VirtIO, and the CDROM as an IDE. But the sucker always want to boot from the empty HD when it starts. This is easily reproducible with a fresh install.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 12:48

I just tested this, and wasn't able to re-produce the problem - a new empty KVM instance booted from a CD just fine.

Is booting from CD selected at System State -> Change Boot Method?

Also, are your virtual disks stored in regular files, or in LVM logical volumes?

Submitted by drtester on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 20:55

Hi Jamie,

Yes, the boot method is set to CD. I use all LVM logical volumes. The latest test was with both CentOS 5.8 x64 and Centos 6.2 x64 image files. I create an empty system, set the image, enable virtio, and after the system starts, nothing.

I am quite amazed that you are not able to duplicate what seems to happen on 100% of my machines, which are all basic installs of CentOS. If you'd like, I can give you shell access to one of the machines to have a closer look.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 22:18

Shell access would be very useful. Also, a screenshot of what you are seeing in the "Graphical Console" page in Cloudmin..

Submitted by ambercromby on Thu, 01/17/2013 - 13:38 Pro Licensee

I too am running into this issue. CentOS 6.3, Cloudmin 6.6

When I create a blank system I cannot boot from the CD. I then run qemu-img create -f raw server.img 60G start system and I can boot from CD. Once anything is written to the drive I can no longer boot from the CD unless I have a RAW drive to force SeaBIOS to skip hard drive boot and move on to CD boot. This make repairs very difficult. It doesn't seem like using the boot method from the cloudmin console does anything. I can't find where the setting are saved to see if in fact they are being save, it also acts like it doesn't have permission to make the needed changes, but there are no error to confirm this.

Submitted by JamieCameron on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 00:14

@ambercromby - are you using a different BIOS package to the one that CentOS installs by default?

Submitted by ambercromby on Fri, 01/18/2013 - 11:44 Pro Licensee

I will say not. I installed CentOS from their site. Installed KVM stuff with yum and installed Cloudmin from here. Nothing too special, I didn't go out looking for anything other than the basics.

Submitted by GetKVM_Ash on Wed, 02/13/2013 - 18:33

Same error here, i just posted a new thread about it.

Same as the others we are using CentOS 6.3 out of the box. Is there a fix for this yet?