Wireless Access

Hi, I'm trying to set up an eval of a mobility master virtual appliance on KVM. I followed the guide and installed itsuccesfully, but it never boots. I've tried it on multiple physical machines always with the same outcome. I have no problems with running other VMs on the hypervisors. I've attached 2 screenshots of what the console output looks like on a normal boot, and on a boot without the quite kernel cmd line argument. 

Did anybody encounter similar problems?

My guess is the hypervisors/KVM servers are not supporting some of the required hardware support required (usually it's virtualization support like Hardware Virtualization support, IntelVT or AMD-V, Intel or AMD SSE support, etc). Generally if the processors are newer than 3-4 years and are 64bit, it usually works, but not all consumer grade CPUs and motherboards will work.

You can open a support case to have them help, but from the screenshot it looks like the hypervisor hardware isn't supported.

You may also want to check in the motherboard BIOS to ensure that VT and SSE types of features are all enabled.

Wasn't the hardware, I have many VMs running on both hypervisors I tried and they all are proper servers.

A KVM feature (PTP_1588_CLOCK_KVM, ) was disabled in the Kernel of the hypervisor that normaly guests don't need, but after enabeling it at least init stated. 

Sadly the MM VM still doesn't work. and there is no usefull debugging output. It starts the device manager and that's it.

That seems very obscure, I wonder if it's some other package that is not present then on the hypervisor? Not sure if you can deploy a full install of your Linux OS on another machine or not. Good luck!

Yeah it's very weird. I hope I get to the bottom of it soon. I'll keep this thread updated. Maybe it helps someone else when they run into similar problems.

After debugging for more then a week I finally found the problem, well actually multiple problems.

The main problem is that the Aruba VAs use an ancient linux kernel that doesn't suppor the default settings of modern KVM hypervisors, namely the Q35 chipset. The main difference beeing that Q35 uses PCI-E whereas the old I440FX uses only PCI. 

This in turn causes the 2nd error, namely that the old kernel can't access any virtio devices that with the new chipset all use PCI-E which the old kernel can't access. This leads to the problem that the massive and huge rcS init script can't find any disks.

But the rcS init scrip has a flaw, it doesn't verify the output of "fdisk -l" which causes the 3rd error. The rcS script silently gets stuck in a endless loop calling "sleep 1" as it tries to wait for a non existend device "/dev/a1" to appear. 

To add a bit of context, The 3.18.26 Linux Kernel that is used in the MM-VA is end-of-life since February 8, 2017.