Debugging Appliance Start

Appliance won't Start

If the appliance fails to start when you start the application, the most likely reason is that the appliance is not starting the VM agent (this is visible during start as the appliance taking a long time to start and then failing; the log says that appliance start timed out). To fix this, make sure the appliance runs the /appliance/vma_load.sh script when it is done booting. All templates from the global catalog have this script and start it by default.

In most cases, even when the appliance doesn't start (times out), you have a couple of minutes to log in on it. Here is how:

• open two ssh sessions to the controller: one from which you will start the application and one to access the appliance
• start the application from the first session
• while the application is starting, go to the second session and check the appliance status using component list shell command
• when you see your appliance in Starting state, wait 10-20 seconds and try to ssh into it (ssh).

Since the default timeout is quite short -- approximately 2 minutes -- you may want to temporarily override the boot timeout. See the General tab on the Instance Settings screen; set the timeout to 3600 seconds (1 hour). Once you troubleshoot the appliance and it begins to start OK, restore the default boot timeout.

If you cannot even ssh to the appliance, then most likely the volume or its boot configuration got corrupted. You can stop the application, manage the volume and inspect it, or start from the template again. If the problem recurs, contact Technical Support.

Appliance starts but property values are not propagated

Appliance starts OK, but all properties are left at their default values in the instrumented configuration files.

1. Check that the configuration files are listed in the Config Files tab of the class in the Class Editor.
2. Check that the configuration files are instrumented using the ADL property markup syntax

-- BeckyH - 29 Apr 2008