OVM CPU Pinning

If you clone or recover an Oracle VM guest, and the source used CPU pinning (Hard Partitioning), the target may not work.  The error is entirely non-intuitive, and I could not find it on the interwebs, so here is a sanitized version.

OVMAPI_5001E Job: 1416254413024/QueuedVmStartDbImpl_1416254413023/OVMJOB_1500J Start/resume vm: PRODVM, on server: PRODSERVER, failed. 
Job Failure Event: 1416254413902/Server Async Command Failed/OVMEVT_00C014D_001 Async command failed on server: PRODSERVER. 
Object: PRODVM, PID: 15431, Server error: 
Command: [‘xm’, ‘create’, ‘/OVS/Repositories/000dead000beef00cafe0421cab55bad/VirtualMachines/000dead000beef00cafef207cabdbbad/vm.cfg’] failed (1): 
stderr: Error: (22, ‘Invalid argument’) 
stdout: Using config file “/OVS/Repositories/000dead000beef00cafe0421cab55bad/VirtualMachines/000dead000beef00cafef207cabdbbad/vm.cfg”. , 
on server: PRODSERVER, associated with object: 000dead000beef00cafef207cabdbbad [Thu Apr 15 00:12:19 EDT 2021]

 

You can remove the “cpus = ‘#-#'” line from vm.cfg to reset this.

References about OVM hard partitioning includes:

xm info

xm list

xenpm get-cpu-topology

xm vcpu-list

# cd /u01/app/oracle/ovm-manager-3/ovm_utils
# ./ovm_vmcontrol -u admin -p YourPassword -h ovm-manager -v my-first-vm -c vcpuset -s 0-7
Oracle VM VM Control utility 0.6.3.
Connected.
Command : vcpuset
Pinning virtual CPUs
Pinning of virtual CPUs to physical threads  '0-7' 'my-first-vm' completed.

After that, vcpu-list will show VM names in column 1 for dedicated CPUs.