service qemu-guest-agent start timeout in Proxmox environment

TL;DR

You don’t have Qemu Guest Agent enabled on the VM. The default is to have it disabled.

Longer explanation

At times on a new Cloud Init installation you might encounter the following error:

root@server:~# service qemu-guest-agent status
○ qemu-guest-agent.service - QEMU Guest Agent
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/qemu-guest-agent.service; static)
Active: inactive (dead)
root@server:~# service qemu-guest-agent start
A dependency job for qemu-guest-agent.service failed. See 'journalctl -xe' for details.

When you do journalctl -xe you get this:

Apr 04 05:45:54 server systemd[1]: Dependency failed for QEMU Guest Agent.
░░ Subject: A start job for unit qemu-guest-agent.service has failed
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: http://www.ubuntu.com/support
░░
░░ A start job for unit qemu-guest-agent.service has finished with a failure.
░░
░░ The job identifier is 545 and the job result is dependency.
Apr 04 05:45:54 server06 systemd[1]: qemu-guest-agent.service: Job qemu-guest-agent.service/start failed with result 'dependency'.
Apr 04 05:45:54 server06 systemd[1]: dev-virtio\x2dports-org.qemu.guest_agent.0.device: Job dev-virtio\x2dports-org.qemu.guest_agent.0.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.

You don’t have Qemu Guest Agent enabled on the VM. The default is to have it disabled.

Reference

• https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/dependency-failed-for-qemu-guest-agent.75797/

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