On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 4:38 PM, Yedidyah Bar David <didi@redhat.com> wrote:

>
> Currently I have set the environment in global maintenance.
> Does it make sense to try to start the HostedEngine with an alternate
> vm.conf to crosscheck it it is then able to start ok?

Not sure. Depends on why you think it currently fails. Sorry but I didn't
check your logs yet.

Because in 4.1.2 it started. During update to 4.1.3 I moved the engine vm without problems to the already updated hosts.
But I suppose during migration the qemu-kvm command line is preserverd, isn't it?
And only when I planned to update kernel of the engine vm so I had to power off it, I began to have problems....
 

> I see that there is the file /var/run/ovirt-hosted-engine-ha/vm.conf that
> seems refreshed every minute

Indeed. In recent versions it's possible to change some of the HE VM
configuration from the engine itself, just like any other VM, so HA
has to update this file.

>
> It seems that apparently I can copy it into another place, modify it and try
> to start engine with the modified file using
>
> hosted-engine --vm-start --vm-conf=/alternate/path_vm.conf
>
> is it correct?

Yes, as also written here:

https://www.ovirt.org/documentation/how-to/hosted-engine/#handle-engine-vm-boot-problems

>
> the modified file would be such that:
>
> [root@ovirt02 images]# diff /var/run/ovirt-hosted-engine-ha/vm.conf
> /root/alternate_vm.conf
> 1,2c1,2
> < cpuType=Broadwell
> < emulatedMachine=pc-i440fx-rhel7.3.0
> ---
>> cpuType=qemu64
>> emulatedMachine=pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0
> [root@ovirt02 images]#

No idea about your specific issue or whether this can fix it, but you can try.
Especially if you can test on a test env...

Best,
--
Didi

And in fact the engine vm is now up again with the customized parameters
How can I have it permanent? Frome where on shared storage are they read?
 
Possibly the problems is generated by my nested environment:

L0 = ESXi 6.0 U2 on NUC6i5syh
L1 are my oVirt hosts on this L0
L2 is my engine VM that doesn't start in 4.1.3

it seems that 
cpuType=Broadwell and/or emulatedMachine=pc-i440fx-rhel7.3.0 
generates problems....

And I think I would have same problems with ordinary VMs, correct?
Gianluca