Open Microscopy Environment

Hi all,
I'm having a problem concerning the OMERO 5.0.0 Virtual Appliance. Simply put, every time I try to boot the Virtual Appliance, the Virtual Box screen goes empty (only a cursor is visible) while Debian is loading. After this occurs, nothing appears to change after half an hour of waiting. Furthermore, I cannot log on to the server with either the OMERO.web or OMERO.insight clients.

More specifically, after starting the Virtual Appliance, I see the Virtual Box splash screen, which is followed by a black screen that displays the lines "Grub loading." and "Welcome to GRUB!" sequentially. A new black screen then appears and displays the text found in this image: http://kmdouglass.github.io/img/ome/setup1-vbScreen.jpg. A few seconds after the line "Loading initial ramdisk ..." is displayed, all text is cleared from the screen and I see only the non-blinking cursor.

I have installed VirtualBox version 4.3.8 r92456 for Windows using the default options. I have also successfully downloaded OMERO Virtual Appliance version 5.0.0-b19. I am running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise 64 bit edition.

Before starting the Virtual Appliance I checked that port forwarding was configured (it was). I followed all the steps listed here: https://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero4/users/virtual-appliance.html.

Would anyone be able to point me towards a solution to this problem so that I may run the Virtual Appliance on my machine?

Thanks!
Kyle

Hi Kyle

We've had occasional reports of problems with VirtualBox which aren't specific to the OMERO image. These are sometimes solved by restarting VirtualBox a few times. The VM should boot relatively quickly so if it hangs you can terminate it and restart straight away.

If that fails could you try rebooting your server?

Thanks, Simon

Hi Simon,
I've actually just solved my problem.

I enabled virtualization support in my computer's BIOS. I performed the following steps to do this on my Dell T7500:

1) Reboot the computer and press F12 to access the boot menu and change the system configuration.
2) Under the Virtualization Support folder on the left-side of the screen, I selected the Virtualization tab.
3) On this page I checked "Enable Intel Virtualization Technology"
4) Under the Virtualization support folder, I selected the VT for Direct I/O tab
5) I checked "Enable Intel VT for Direct I/O."

I don't know why this works, but it does. I have never run a virtual machine before.

Kyle

Hi Kyle

Thanks for letting us know your solution. We'll try to see if it's repeatable on other systems, and update our docs if necessary.

Simon

Hi Simon,
It might help you if I explain how I found this solution.

This is what I did before the problem was solved: In VirtualBox, I selected the Virtual Appliance and clicked settings. This brings up a menu with a list of categories on the left side. I selected "System" from this list. Under the Motherboard tab in this menu, there is a slider that allows you to adjust the Base Memory for the appliance. I tinkered with it and discovered that setting it to 3000 MB or under let me boot the Virtual Appliance, but setting it to 4000 MB or greater resulted in an error prompt.

I don't remember the error prompt message exactly, but it did read something like "VT-X is disabled in the bios." I searched around and discovered that VT-X is related to the Intel Virtualization technology and that I could enable it in the BIOS, so I did. After doing this, the Virtual Appliance works.

The curious thing is that I'm currently able to boot the Virtual Appliance and use it successfully with a VirtualBox base memory setting of 1000 MB. Previously, I could boot the appliance without an error prompt at this base memory setting, but I still had the problem that the screen would hang after the "Loading initial ramdisk..." message.

I have also noticed the Virtual Appliance's screen will hang after half an hour to an hour of use, so maybe the memory issue isn't fully addressed by my solution. At least it works long enough for me to evaluate it

Hi Kyle

Thanks for the additional information. Regarding your problem with the VM hanging after 30 minutes, I had exactly the same problem with VirtualBox 4.3.6 on my Mac (OS X 10.8), though so far 4.3.8 seems to be OK. It could be that the 4.3 series of VirtualBox is still a bit buggy.

Simon