Virtualbox wont open

[Red Squirrel]

I have VirtualBox running on Fedora Core 9 (whatever version is latest for that distro, I can't open it to check) and randomly I lost all my VMs, had to force quit them. I think the NFS connection randomly dropped or something, I really don't know why it did that but it really can't be good. I am working on migrating this to a newer OS/hardware but now I can't evne open it. I double clicked it a million times, it just wont launch. If I type VirtualBox in the command line it just sits and does nothing.

I don't want to reboot that server, it's not something I can do at this time, not until I migrate everything over. (the host runs lot of stuff too).

Is there anything I can do to get this to work? Is there some kind of log I can check to see what's going on?

There is also several VirtualBox <defunct> processes. Even kill -9 wont get rid of them.

[noteirak]

Do I understand correctly that your VMs are located on a NFS share? If yes, it's not a Virtualbox problem but NFS/Linux system problem. NFS has a tendency to just hang (with timeout or not) when trying to reach files located on a share which is not available, so it is a VERY BAD idea to locate your VM files anywhere else than your local disk.

[Red Squirrel]

There is no local storage disk, everything is on my SAN. I don't do local storage on my servers, other than for OS. It's been like this forever, but now it acted up and I can't get it to work again. The shares are fine and I can access the data but can't open Virtualbox at all. Oddly I have some shares on Vmware ESX on the same Luns and those were not affected so the issue is most likely the old (Virtualbox) VM host itself. It's a very old OS, I just need to get everything off there and retire it/install something newer.

Either way, I need to get VirtualBox to open again. It wont even open, at all. I type the command or doubleclick it and nothing happens. Is there something I can do to at least get a log? I think I also need to somehow kill those defunct processes. If virtualbox checks for existing process before executing then it may be why it's not executing anymore.

And yeah NFS can be flaky as hell, but it seems to be the only thing available for shared mass storage. iSCSI is technically only for 1 host. There are hacks to make stuff work across multiple but typically speaking it's not meant to be used on multiple host's at same time.

[noteirak]

Attach as zip file the latest VM log file of a stuck VM, we'll see how far it went (if it did go somewhere)

[Red Squirrel]

Where would I find that log?

Anyway I managed to get it unstuck. Turns out there's a umount -l command that is more powerful than -f, so I was able to forcibly unmount all shares and that unstuck virtualbox. I need to find something more powerful than kill -9 though as the defunct processes are still there, but they arn't causing any harm that I can tell.

My NFS is still screwed up, it refuses to reconnect to the server again, but that's another issue. I wish they would come up with something more stable than NFS for mass file storage across multiple servers. NFS can be so flaky.