IVM guest and host freeze/hang when guest given 32GB of RAM

[Matthew Dulson]

Hi,

I have an issue whereby if I start an IVM guest and give it 32GB of RAM, then as soon as I put any load on the guest, both the guest and the underlying host freeze (whilst on the console I get about 2 characters a minute back if I try to type a command.) As soon as I hpvmstop the guest, everything works fine. If I give the guest 22GB of RAM then it's fine as well. The host has 96GB of RAM, and there are only 2 more guests on the blade, with 12GB and 8GB of RAM. HPVM version is 4.1 on both host and guest, and it's HP-UX 11.31 on both as well. I've applied all the HPVM and "vm" patches I can find, but to no avail.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

HPVM 4.2.05 does deal with this issue.

You might find that helps.

I checked the doc and there is not a limitation at 32 GB as far as I know.

SEP

[Matthew Dulson]

Thanks for that, I can't see anything in the 4.2.5 release notes that talks about this being fixed - do you have any more information?
N.B The issue seems to go away when I set base_pagesize to 64 on the guest (as per the default settings for 4.1 it was already set to this on the host)

[danny marshall]

Looks like this is now fixed in PHSS_41785
which has just been released.

[Torsten.]

A new feature of the current 4.3 version is 128 GB guest memory.
AFAIR the maximum for v4.1 was 64GB, but there was an issue described in the notes. Hopefully fixed in the current release.

[TwoProc]

We saw lots of this exact same thing at first with our systems, it took a number of passes of firmware updates, patches, etc. as indicated by others. The good news is, the solution is just firmware matching and review, as well as software updates and some patches to level out.