VM suddenly died will not reboot, what happened?

[gaspoweredcat]

i setup an ubuntu server vm to host a wiki on my freenas server, after a few hiccups i finally got it working perfectly, added all the content for my wiki and this morning i came to access it, but there was no response on the page, i connected via VNC and all i get is the UEFI shell, it simply wont boot anymore, nothing was done in the period between when i last used it and when i tried to access it this morning, neither the server itself nor the VM were restarted by me but its like its formatted the drive or something.

does anyone have any explanation of what might have happened? im now rather concerned about trying again as from now ill be adding new content to it and would rather not have it suddenly up and die at random again, is there a more stable way of doing it as i really dont want to have to keep rebuilding the thing every day (the thing that puzzles me most is that literally nothing was done to it between it working and not, no one even accessed the server)

 

[KrisBee]

What VM status was shown in the webUI - running or stopped? Did you ensure you could "poweroff" in the VM itself and restart via the WebUI OK while if was in a minimal config state & before adding the WIKI stuff ? Did you enable ssh in the VM? Could you find the efi boot files when exiting for the UEFI shell to the boot manager UI? Is there a bhyve vm running at all?

 

[gaspoweredcat]

it was listed as RUNNING i has ssh enabled, rebooted through the webUI but no luck, couldnt power off or shutdown in the vm as it simply wouldnt boot. im not sure why it even went down, ubuntu server wouldnt normally shut down on its own and i had auto updates disabled. the efi files were gone, it basically appeared like it had completely formatted the drive, i have scrapped it and torn up a fresh VM to try again but for now im treating it like it will die at any second and syncing to a git repo every 30 mins so i dont end up losing data, guess ill just have to see if it happens again (if it dies again im just going to admit defeat and stick it on a raspberry pi but im still curious as to why it nuked it at random)

 

[KrisBee]

You didn't try to boot VM with a rescue cd then to see if any files were intact, or check host processes & logs? Assume you had done the post install fix for UEFI booting of a Linux vm using bhyve. This is with FreeNAS-11 stable? Would be nice to know is this is a possible FreeNas/bhyve bug as opposed to some other underlying problem in your FreeNas server. Thought about re-test using debian 9? Or do you need more up to date packages?

Ps I don't know if it should make any difference, but were you using virtio foryour devices and does ubuntu server use acpi by default?