RE: [Xen-users] Major corruption of Windows HVM disks - Xen 3.4

["James Harper" <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> I've come back into work after the weekend and noticed that all (3) of
> our Windows HVMs have had massive issues with corruption of the hard
> disks. These have all been running rock solid on Xen 3.2.1 for the
past
> 9 months or so but I upgraded their host to Xen 3.4 last week.
> 
>   I noticed on Friday morning that all 3 had randomly rebooted on
> Thursday evening but tried not to think too much of it.  Unfortunately
> as I say I have come in this morning and they are all in various
states
> of disrepair.
> 
> One VM is claiming ntloader.exe is not on the disk (presumably with a
> number of other files), the other had crashed so I started it back up,
> it ran checkdsk before running through lots of corrupt and missing
> files, rebooting and is now BSODing on boot and the third boots but
has
> an event log full of SQL Server errors talking about file corruption.
As
> such I'm having to restore all three from backups which is not ideal.
> 
> Has anyone experienced anything similar to this? Is it likely to be a
> problem with qemu rather than Xen? Either way, I am left with no
choice
> than to roll back to a previous version of Xen as I cannot risk this
> happening again.
> 

Have you established that the virtual disks are definitely corrupt, as
opposed to something gone wrong in Dom0 that makes them seem corrupt. I
can't think what would cause that situation to arise though.

Are you using my GPLPV drivers? If so, then I would really like to hear
more about what went wrong so I can look into it and make sure it isn't
a problem with the drivers, although for all 3 domU's to fail
simultaneously like that it would be unlikely to be a DomU side problem.

In my experience, the qemu drivers are prone to this sort of thing on
unclean shutdowns unfortunately, although I would have thought less so
with 3.4 than with 3.2... I have seen it before under 3.1 with Dom0
running out of memory and firing up the OOM killer (snmpd memory leak),
although the worst I've seen was a corrupt Exchange database that
restored without further problems.

Did you upgrade the Dom0 kernel when you upgraded xen?

Good luck with the restores.

James


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