qemu-kvm not working as nested inside ESX 6.0

[fxpester]

ESX 6.0 (virt bits exposed) - Ubuntu 16.04 + qemu-kvm 1:2.8+dfsg-3ubuntu2~cloud0 - CirrOS launched by OpenStack (devstack master)

VM will start with -machine = 'pc-i440fx-zesty' and will stuck in "booting from hard disk"

to fix it you can manually change -machine to 'pc-i440fx-2.3'

also, ISOs boots well, so I think it`s something about block devices configuration introduced in new machine type.

p.s.
also confirmed with RHEL instead of Ubuntu as KVM host - new machine type don`t work

[Michael Johnson (johnsom)]

It appears that the recent qemu packages released for 16.04 set the machine type to "pc-i440fx-zesty" instead of "pc-i440fx-xenial". If you override this and make it use "pc-i440fx-xenial" instances boot again.

FYI, if you are using OpenStack, this can be done by editing nova.conf, [libvirt] section, and add hw_machine_type = x86_64=pc-i440fx-xenial

[Christian Ehrhardt  (paelzer)]

Thanks Thomas for redirecting this to us.

@fxpester - qemu uses the latest default machine type.
Since you run on 16.04 but have -zesty types that means you run very likely with the Ubuntu Cloud Archive.

That is what makes more recent virtualization stacks around openstack available on LTS releases.
As Michael already pointed out in c#1 you can set the type as needed.

I'll add a task for the openstack team who maintains the cloud archive so they can see this as well. I have no ESX around to retry atm, but OTOH haven't seen any such issue on Bare metal nor on nested KVM<->KVM. I'm not sure about the severity yet, as nesting is always a bit less supported.

@Openstack Team do you have VMware testbeds?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[James Page (james-page)]

@paelzer

No we don't - sorry.

[Sahid Orentino (sahid-ferdjaoui)]

I marked it as "Incomplete" since the bug reported is quite old and it's not clear what should be done at this point.

Please feel free to mark it back to "New" with further details if necessary.

Thanks,