The first step for troubleshooting a VM image that appears to not boot correctly, or hangs waiting to get an IP, is to check it with a VNC viewer. A key thing to remember is that if the VM doesn’t get an IP, then vagrant can’t communicate with it to configure anything, so a problem at this stage is likely to come from the VM, but we’ll outline the tools and common problems to help you troubleshoot that.
By default, when you create a new VM, a vnc server will listen on 127.0.0.1 on port TCP5900. If you connect with a vnc viewer you can see the boot process. If your VM isn’t listening on 5900 by default;
- Check the create domain details outputted to the console, or
- Use
virsh dumpxmlto find out which port it’s listening on, or - Explicitly configure it with
graphics_portandgraphics_ip(see ‘Domain Specific Options’).
Note: Connecting with the console (virsh console) requires additional config, so some VMs may not show anything on the console at all, instead displaying it in the VNC console. The issue with the text console is that you also need to build the image used to tell the kernel to output to the console during boot, and typically most do not have this built in.
Problems we’ve seen in the past include:
- Forgetting to remove
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rulesbefore packaging the VM - VMs expecting a specific disk device to be connected
If you’re still confused, check the Github Issues for this repo for anything that looks similar to your problem.
Github Issue #1032 contains some historical troubleshooting for VMs that appeared to hang.
Did you hit a problem that you’d like to note here to save time in the future? Please do!