VM's Reboot without Warning

Question

I am using OVM for development test environments using a Dell 2950 with 32GB of memory. I'm good on memory usage and disk space.
About a month ago I created a new VM with OEL5.4 named "alta" with 2GB memory. I also updated Domain 0 to Oracle VM server release 2.2.0.
The problem I'm seeing is that alta will reboot spontaeously. It usually occurs when downloading something from the internet or copying files across from a mounted directory on another server.
I've checked /var/log/messages and there is no message in either the OVM Server or alta indicating the problem that caused the reboot. I've tested it by tail -f on the syslog and nothing shows up when the reboot occurs.
I've never had any other VM's spontaneously reboot so this is a real puzzler. Any suggestions on how to capture what is going on?
Here's the vm.cfg for alta.
acpi = 1
apic = 1
builder = 'hvm'
device_model = '/usr/lib/xen/bin/qemu-dm'
disk = ['file:/var/ovs/mount/0DEAA78E20204555982F4A6B7E78BDB4/running_pool/362_alta/System.img,hda,w',
'file:/var/ovs/mount/0DEAA78E20204555982F4A6B7E78BDB4/running_pool/362_alta/u01.img,hdb,w',
'file:/var/ovs/mount/0DEAA78E20204555982F4A6B7E78BDB4/sharedDisk/SVD01.img,hdd,w!',
',hdc:cdrom,r',
disk_other_config = []
kernel = '/usr/lib/xen/boot/hvmloader'
keymap = 'en-us'
maxmem = 4096
memory = 2048
name = '362_alta'
on_crash = 'restart'
on_reboot = 'restart'
pae = 1
serial = 'pty'
timer_mode = '2'

Answer 1

Instead of installing the kernel debuginfo rpm and using crash, you can simply run strings on the core dump and look for the kernel log messages. Or you can configure a serial console in your guest, and use the xm console command to watch the guest kernel console messages. You can even record them to a file with the script command on dom0.