[Solved] Ancient Red Hat System Freezes

[pmprogrammer]

This system was originally P to V'd in 2009 to VMware ESX host environment and was running stable in that environment (years between reboots). We are having to relocate it to a Windows host. It is an ancient system of record no longer actively used in a 'production' environment, but needs to be available for querying. It hosts an Oracle 9i database. Since it is an historic system of record it is preferable to make as few changes to the system as possible.

The system boots and runs fine, but usually within hours (this last time it stayed up for over 37 hours) of starting the Oracle databases (prod and oms) the system will freeze. Not positive that the DB's running has anything to do with the freezing.

The only change to settings made prior to this last run of 37+ hours of uptime, I changed the setting on the display tab to enable 3D acceleration, and increased the video memory from 6MB to the max of 128MB. Prior to that the system would freeze after minutes or hours of starting the Oracle db's.

VirtualBox Version 5.0.8 r103449

HOST:
Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter
Intel Xeon CPU ES-2690 @2.90GHz (2 processors)
192 GB RAM
64-bit OS, x64-based processor
The host is actually a Hyper-V host. We had initially attempted to get this same RHEL linux guest system running as a Hyper-V guest, but Hyper-V has no provision to boot a 32bit system from a SCSI drive. We had then attempted to run the guest under the auspices of the VMware Player, however, that product apparently can't (or won't) run on either a Hyper-V guest or host system. VirtualBox to the rescue!

GUEST (32 bit):
[oracle@xxxx-db1 oracle]$ uname -a
Linux xxxx-db1.xxxx.org 2.4.21-47.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Jul 5 20:38:41 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

[oracle@xxxx-db1 oracle]$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.21-47.ELsmp (bhcompile@hs20-bc1-1.build.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-54)) #1 SMP Wed Jul 5 20:38:41 EDT 2006

Below output is from top running in an ssh session at the time the system froze this morning at just after 5am central time. Vbox console screenshot was blank.

05:14:00 up 1 day, 13:53, 7 users, load average: 1.16, 1.05, 0.65
251 processes: 238 sleeping, 13 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle
total 49.6% 0.0% 12.0% 0.1% 0.0% 38.1% 0.0%
Mem: 13054564k av, 1406368k used, 11648196k free, 0k shrd, 160532k buff
1074568k active, 191532k inactive
Swap: 1052248k av, 0k used, 1052248k free 995192k cached


Attempted to install the Guest Additions on 2015-11-11, but this system being as old as it is, got a kernel error: "The headers for the current running kernel were not found." Output of the Guest Additions install and vboxadd-install.log is attached.

The guest's disks are still in VMware's vmdk format.

Thanks,
Paul Martin

[Perryg]

Read this ticket and see if it helps. https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/10745 ... num_hist=3

[pmprogrammer]

Thanks Perryg. Giving this a try:

Changed 17 months ago by frank
Better use

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME "VBoxInternal/MM/CanUseLargerHeap" 1

[pmprogrammer]

Server has been up over 67 hours after modifying as below:

VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME "VBoxInternal/MM/CanUseLargerHeap" 1


Thanks for the help!