On Fri, 2020-10-30 at 11:56 -0500, vladimir franciz blando wrote:

Hi,

I edited the  libvirt xml (virsh edit...) file of a running Windows server instance because I changed the video model type from cirrus to vmvga so it can support a higher resolution on a console (cirrus supports up to 1280 only).

After editing, i "soft-rebooted" the instance and the new configuration sticks.  That's awesome.

Please don't do this :) You shouldn't change things about an instance behind nova's back. It breaks resource tracking and can cause all sorts of horribleness.

But when you do a "hard-reboot" it will revert back to the original config.

Hard reboot builds configuration from scratch, dumping the existing XML. This is built from the same things used when you first create the instance (flavor + extra specs, image + metadata, host-level config, ...).

What you want is the 'hw_video_model' image metadata property. Set this and rebuild your instance:

openstack image set --property hw_video_model=vmvga $IMAGE

openstack server rebuild $SERVER $IMAGE

Note that rebuild is a destructive operation so be sure you're aware of what this is doing before you do it.

Stephen

I also tried to do a "shut-down" then "start" again, but it still reads the original config.  Not sure where it  is reading the config from...

Regards

Vlad