I was testing XenServer 5.6 100-47101p, I installed four VM's, two FreeBSD and two Windows.
After installing the four VM's, I recompiled the VM containing FreeBSD 8.2 i386 kernel to enable/support XEN, after rebooting, the console on the XenCenter, did not show nothing (buggy kernels normally do not boot), I tried to force Shutdown/force Reboot the VM, but nothing happened, on the logs I got the common message that the stop or reboot could not be done because a pending task.
via ssh on the XenServer, I tried the: xe task-list xe task-cancel force=true uuid=, xe vm-shutdown, etc but nothing worked. the only way to stop the VM was to reboot the XenServer and disabling the Auto-Start on server boot on the properties of the VM.
After rebooting the full Xenserver (all other VM went down ), I started again the FreeBSD 8 (buggy KERNEL) to debug or found something on the console, but instead of getting at least the BIOS of the boot process I got the console for the WINDOWS OS, images below:
And again I couldn't stop, restart, or delete the VM.
After rebooting the server, the same behavior happens, someone XenServer is not properly holding/encapsulating the VM at a point that allow or shares the VNC of another VM within the buggy instance, this is for sure a bug.
But I would like to know, how to prevent rebooting the Xenserver every time something like this happens, since I want to test different FreeBSD kernels, but is a pain to reboot the full server affecting other working VM, since currently I can not stop/delete/reboot the test VM instance.
In theory XenServer should have the ability to properly isolate the VM instance, but as explained here is not properly doing it. And in my case it not being useful for testing since Is like having a single machine the one I have to reboot every time freezes.
So, any ideas of how to solve this, excluding changing XenServer with something like VMWARE ESXI in where indeed this issue doest not happen.?
Does XenServer uses the same code/source of the open-source the Xen project? does it make any difference related to this issue use either one of them?
just for the record, I have successfully installed FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 and FreeBSD 9 BETA both with XEN support enable on the kernel with out any issue, but besides the OS the point is that if some one else want's to test any KERNEL, LINUX ETC the VM should be isolated, otherwise is very difficult and tedious to make this kind of tests.
If some would like to replicate this, just needs to install FreeBSD 8.2 i386 (install the sources) and later recompile the kernel using the XEN options (usr/src/sys/i386/conf/XEN)
#cd /usr/src
#make buildkernel=XEN
#make installkernel=XEN
reboot and you will crash something inside XenServer that wont allow you to delete/stop/remove this VM.
on the XenServer Eventlog you will see this: Error: Another operation involving the objects is currently in progress
for the installation I am using the FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso
MD5 (FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso) = ac6b2485e0e8a9e3c5f3a51803a5af32
