Cannot resume from pause state

[thegnark]

Hello, I noticed that one of my virtual machines was in a paused state. Not sure how this occurred, as I did not issue the controlvm pause command. Anyhow, I tried resuming, but the machine doesn't seem to stay alive. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to resolve this and possibly also research why the pause occured.

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server" | grep State
State:           paused (since 2008-08-26T21:56:48.212000000)

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" resume
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server" | grep State
State:           paused (since 2008-08-26T22:16:05.707000000)

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage discardstate "Ubuntu Server"
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

[!] FAILED calling virtualBox->OpenSession(session, guid) at line 6008!
[!] Primary RC  = E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005) - Access denied
[!] Full error info present: true , basic error info present: true
[!] Result Code = E_ACCESSDENIED (0x80070005) - Access denied
[!] Text        = A session for the machine 'Ubuntu Server' is currently open (or being closed)
[!] Component   = Machine, Interface: IMachine, {f95c0793-7737-49a1-85d9-6da81097173b}
[!] Callee      = IVirtualBox, {2d3b9ea7-25f5-4f07-a8e1-7dd7e0dcf667}

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" reset
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

[!] FAILED calling console->Reset() at line 5558!
[!] Primary RC  = NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) - Operation failed
[!] Full error info present: true , basic error info present: true
[!] Result Code = NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) - Operation failed
[!] Text        = Cannot reset the machine as it is not running (machine state: 5)
[!] Component   = Console, Interface: IConsole, {d5a1cbda-f5d7-4824-9afe-d640c94c7dcf}
[!] Callee      = IConsole, {d5a1cbda-f5d7-4824-9afe-d640c94c7dcf}

And some more example of what looks like the machine immediately pauses after resume (notice the different "since" times):

Code: Select all

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" resume && VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server"|grep State
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

State:           paused (since 2008-08-26T22:39:17.958000000)

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" resume && VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server"|grep State
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

State:           paused (since 2008-08-26T22:39:18.672000000)

$ VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" resume && VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server"|grep State
VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 1.6.4
(C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
All rights reserved.

State:           paused (since 2008-08-26T22:39:19.466000000)

[Sasquatch]

Please give more info about the Host and Guest configuration. See Forum Posting Guide for what we need to know. How much ram do you have on your Host, set for the VM and available before the VM starts?

[thegnark]

Host is headless Ubuntu 8.04. The guest in question is also Ubuntu Server 8.04. I have just recently increased the RAM on the host from 2GB to 4GB. I took this reboot opportunity to increase the ram on the guest from 256MB to 1024MB. I did notice that the guest had actually filled the RAM allocated and was heavily dipping into swap - which prompted my to increase the RAM of the host in the first place.

Here is some more information (all executed on host obviously):

Code: Select all

$ uname -a
Linux servername 2.6.24-19-server #1 SMP Fri Jul 11 21:50:43 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3898       2423       1474          0         64        731
-/+ buffers/cache:       1626       2271
Swap:         3812          0       3812

$ VBoxManage showvminfo "Ubuntu Server" | grep Memory
Memory size:     1024MB

[Sasquatch]

Does not look like it's pausing due to lack of RAM. Could be that your hard drive where the VDI is located is full.

[thegnark]

Pretty sure it's not an issue with the host OS or hardware, as I have other VMs running just fine. Here's some disk info:

Disk Usage:

Code: Select all

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             9.3G  948M  7.9G  11% /
/dev/sda2              61G   13G   46G  23% /home

File Usage:

Code: Select all

$ du -h /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/
128K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Windows Server 2003/Logs
136K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Windows Server 2003
116K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Ubuntu Server/Logs
124K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Ubuntu Server
408K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Windows XP/Logs
416K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines/Windows XP
680K    /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/Machines
13G     /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/VDI
13G     /home/vboxuser/.VirtualBox/

[Sasquatch]

It's really too bad that you have a headless machine there. If you could attach a monitor, perhaps you can see what is really happening. As it being headless, I doubt you have a GUI running.
I'm out of ideas.

[thegnark]

Well, it's headless only in the aspect that there is no GUI and I don't ever sit down to it.

Obviously, I have other machines with VirtualBox installed, it's too bad you can't point the GUI at a different box/installation to manage those VMs... that would be a feature I would really love.

Also, I can't imagine there is something the GUI reports that I can't find by digging through log files.

I was able to at least the get VM back to a usable state by killing the pid and starting it back up... not really the solution I was looking for obviously.