Restart Failed Server

From time to time our virtual servers exceed their allocated memory and fail with oom (out of memory) errors. It is usually necessary to perform a hard reset of the virtual servers.

How to reset a virtual server depends on the virtualization technology in use by the server.

The first step is to checkout our SVN repository of servers.

Then, examine the "available-servers" directory. You should see a directory for every server we are running.

Inside each directory, there's a file called "virtualization".

The virtualization file will say either: vserver, xen, or kvm.

In addition, there's a symlink called "host" which will point to the host server for this virtual server. For all servers, you will need to ssh into the host server to perform a reset.

xen

• Unplug the server:

  xm destroy <server-name>
  

• Restart the server:

  xm create -c <server-name>
  

kvm

• unplug the server:

  sv down <server-name>
  

• restart:

  sv up <server-name>
  

vserver

• shutdown

  vserver <server-name> stop
  

• start

  vserver <server-name> start