Re: [PATCH test-tools,e2e-tests 0/6] randomly select VMIDs for test

["Lukas Wagner" <l.wagner@proxmox.com>]

On Thu Sep 17, 2026 at 6:23 PM CEST, Michael Köppl wrote:
> Instead of using `/cluster/nextid`, VMIDs are randomly selected from a
> range (by default from 1000000 to 9999999). This is supposed to make 2
> problems that would occur very unlikely:
> 1) Some tests would fail if multiple guests were created sequentially
>    because `/cluster/nextid` would return an ID that was already free
>    after the VM using it had been destroyed, but the cleanup process for
>    the VM was still running. By randomly selecting, this is vanishingly
>    unlikely.

As briefly discussed off-list, I wonder if this shouldn't be fixed in
the API instead, if possible at all. It's a bit odd that
`/cluster/nextid` returns a VMID that cannot be used immediately due to
running cleanups.

That being said, randomly sampling the VMID sounds like an okay
workaround for now.


> 2) When multiple test runs run in parallel (e.g. on different nodes of
>    the same cluster), it could also happen that `/cluster/nextid`
>    returned the same VMID for both runs, resulting in an error upon
>    creation of the guest in one of the runs.
>
> The initial plan was to add a lock file in
> /etc/pve/priv/proxmox-e2e-tests (or a similarly named dir) for each VMID
> currently in use. However, this would not solve the first issue, making
> the random selection necessary anyway. In addition, the file lock could
> leave behind lock files on a user's test system upon interrupted test
> runs.
>
> Thus, the patch series adds a new library function to the test
> repository, replaces all uses of `/cluster/nextid` to `random_vmid()` in
> the 3 test suites, and adds a runner param for manipulating the range.
>