topic Re: Cloned CDOT 8.3 simulators panic during boot in Simulator Discussions

Cloned CDOT 8.3 simulators panic during boot

YBENDOVER — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:46:09 GMT

I have a weird issue with a couple of CDOT 8.3 simulators. I just set up two sets of two-node clusters, i.e. four simulators in total, stored in one VMware datastore over NFS. After configuring the sims for our lab and training needs, I halted them and created a snapshot of the datastore volume. Next step was to create a FlexClone of the datastore volume, mount it under a new name and register the sims with four new unique names. Question "Moved or copied" is answered "Copied". I have done this MANY times with older versions of CDOT and 7mode sims.

This time, all four sims panics with the following message:
WAFL CPLEDGER is enabled. Checklist = 0x7ff841ff
PANIC : prod/common/wafl/free_cache.c:909: Assertion failure.
version: 8.3: Mon Mar 9 19:20:57 PDT 2015
conf : x86_64.sim
cpuid = 0
Uptime: 51s
recursive PANIC: page fault (supervisor read data, page not present) on VA 0xd0
cs:rip 0x20:0xffffffff85f6e87a rflags 0x10046
cpuid = 0
Uptime: 51s

The operating system has halted.
Please press any key to reboot.

(hopefully I typed everything correctly, since there is no way to copy&paste from the vSphere console...

The changes I have made to the sims are

Added four Ethernet ports
Changed systemid on the second nodes of each cluster to match the licenses
Removed pre-configured disks in systemshell and added 32 x 9GB FC (type 36) and 16 x 500MB SSD (type 35). These sizes should be supported in 8.3, but did I add too many?

If I power on the original sims in the parent FlexVol then these work just fine. So question is what happens during the clone. As I said, I have done this dozens of times before with other releases.

Any help appreciated.

Cheers / Benjamin

Re: Cloned CDOT 8.3 simulators panic during boot

shatfield — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 02:23:37 GMT

Thats more disk than the sim can hold by default. Did you replace ide1:1 with a larger disk?

The panic looks more like ram/vnvram. Did you adjust the ram allocation?

You could try flushing the nvram at boot by setting this in the vloader:

setenv nvram_discard true

Re: Cloned CDOT 8.3 simulators panic during boot

YBENDOVER — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 06:27:34 GMT

Aahh...the script I use for the cloning changes the memory size to 2 GB. The 8.1 and 8.2 sims worked better that way. But with the 8.3 OVA the new default is 8GB and the sims started nicely after changing back to 8GB. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

BTW, what is the actual disk capacity maximum? As far as I could read, the sim supports up to 56 disks of any of the available types.

Cheers / Benjamin

Re: Cloned CDOT 8.3 simulators panic during boot

shatfield — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 15:36:05 GMT

Its about 220gb. The old tgz files had a 250gb drive to hold the simdisks, the ova has a 230gb drive.

You can build them with 56x9gb disks, but you need to replace the default IDE drive with one large enough to hold them all.