Problems after Proxmox update to v1.5

After the update of Proxmox to version 1.5 and a reboot of the host all virtual qemu server (using KVM) where not booting up. It does not matter if it is a Windows XP or Windows 7, they stop there:

Starting SeaBIOS ( Version ......)

gPXE (htt://....) - 00:03.0 C900 PCI2.10 Pnp BBS PMM7FE0@10 C900

Press F12 for boot menu

So also trying to boot from CD-ROM will not help in that case. After some search on the web i found the solution in the Proxmox forum.

So the System was missing some packages, you can easily solve this with:

aptitude update && aptitude upgrade && aptitude install proxmox-ve-2.6.24

After reboot if you enter

# pveversion -v

you should find there the actual packages which correspond together. At the time of writing:
# pveversion -v
pve-manager: 1.5-10 (pve-manager/1.5/4822)
running kernel: 2.6.24-11-pve
proxmox-ve-2.6.24: 1.5-23
pve-kernel-2.6.24-11-pve: 2.6.24-23
pve-kernel-2.6.24-8-pve: 2.6.24-16
qemu-server: 1.1-16
pve-firmware: 1.0-5
libpve-storage-perl: 1.0-13
vncterm: 0.9-2
vzctl: 3.0.23-1pve11
vzdump: 1.2-5
vzprocps: 2.0.11-1dso2
vzquota: 3.0.11-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 0.12.4-1

Ubuntu Distribution Upgrade in a OpenVZ Container

If you use Debain Lenny on your OpenVZ host and your Container is a Ubuntu 9.04 and you want to do a apt-get dist-upgrade to 9.10 you will end on the host with this error:

# vzctl enter 1234
enter into VE 1234 failed
Unable to open pty: No such file or directory

What happend? In Ubuntu upstart is responsible for the initialization process but therefore it needs some kernel specific stuff which is not in the 2.6.26 kernel from Debian Lenny. There is a bug report on Launchpad describing the problem.

So on the blog of bodhizazen, the person who started the bug report, you can find the needed upstart script of Stéphane Graber. Like written in bodhizazen blog entry do the following on the host:

cd /var/lib/vz/private/[VZID]/etc/init/
wget http://bodhizazen.net/openvz.conf

Now you can connect again to your virtual ubuntu machine. But if you upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 you will receive the error message like above.

The solution was found fast, again from Stéphane Graber.

Simply edit /etc/init/openvz.conf and remove the two mount lines for /proc and /sys.

Now you can enjoy your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS container on a Debian Lenny host.

fosvm 0.03a

Working on the shell is not everyone's favorite way to interact with a computer, especially when it comes to the point to enter a long cryptographic command, which you only need once or twice a year, for example changing some parameters on a openvz container.

So I was searching for a free and open source management tool like the nice Proxmox Virtual Environment - but Proxmox VE is just available for 64bit Intel/AMD systems, which support Intel VT or AMD-V capable CPU.

On the OpenVZ homepage I found a page with control panels. I started at the first entry on the page: fosvm - Free Open Source Virtual Machine Manager

It looked like the thing I was searching for - a lightweight monitor. I'm running a fresh installed Debian Lenny, so for the installation I had to add the following packages: apache2, php5, php5-mysql, mysql.

For fosvm 0.03a to work, you need to create a mysql-user with some privileges. In the documentation I couldn't find the privileges which were exactly needed. Before you start the installation of fosvm 0.03a, you should fix the install script, install.sh, by changing the line "crontab -l > cron/tmp.cron" to "crontab cron/tmp.cron", or else you will write the actual crontab into the file, not the other way around. I also created a forum-post about this problem, hoping the maintainer of fosvm will response.

fosvm looks real promising, and like most of open source projects starting with a 0.0x version number and ending with a 'a' for alpha are not yet ready for productive systems - but i will keep an eye on it!