Ubuntu 16.04 cloudimg OVA hangs during boot on VMWare VM with Compatibility > 5.5

[Tuure Laurinolli]

OVA used: https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/xenial/current/xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64.ova

Created a new VM using vSphere 6.5.0 Flash client and Deploy OVF functionality. Target host is VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 5969303, managed through the vSphere.

When initially created, the VM was created with ESXi Compatibility version 5.5 (VMWare HW version 10). I later upgraded the VM to ESXi Compatibility 6.0 (VMWare HW version 11), after which it hung up during the boot process (see attached screenshot).

I then attached a serial port to the VM to get kernel logs during boot. With a serial port attached, the boot process no longer hangs. Removing the serial port reproduces the issue, and adding it back resolves it again.

The issue also reproduces with ESXi Compatibility 6.5 (VMWare HW version 13).

I tried to get more information from the system using magic sysrq, but I have not yet found anyway to get the commands across to the VM.

[Andrea Franceschini (afranceschini)]

Hello,

i believe the problem you're experiencing is due to the lack of serial port on the vm provisioned by openstack.

By default Openstack vmware module doesn't add a virtual serial interface to the VM, and this can cause issues with some linux images.

To verify this you can either manually add a serial interface directly on the newly created vm.

If this is the case you can add the following lines to /etc/nova/nova.conf:

[vmware]
serial_port_service_uri = vSPC.py
serial_port_proxy_uri = telnet://172.16.6.33:13370

This force nova to add a serial interface to the VM and force the out to a virtual serial port server, which in may case happens to be this one "https://sourceforge.net/p/vspcpy/code/ci/master/tree/" and runs on the address 172.16.6.33 port 13370.

You can refer to this "https://review.openstack.org/#/c/149203/" for more informations.

Hope it helps.

Andrea

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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