# Trellis VM won't start after reboot: "vz driver is running but host agent is not"

**URL:** https://discourse.roots.io/t/trellis-vm-wont-start-after-reboot-vz-driver-is-running-but-host-agent-is-not/30350
**Category:** trellis
**Tags:** lima
**Created:** 2026-05-24T00:25:50Z
**Posts:** 3

## Post 1 by @ben — 2026-05-24T00:25:50Z

Just ran into an issue after rebooting my machine where `trellis vm start` failed with this error:

```
❯ trellis vm start
Running command => limactl start example.com
INFO[0000] Using the existing instance "example.com"
FATA[0000] errors inspecting instance: [vz driver is running but host agent is not]
Error starting VM.
exit status 1
```

Running `limactl list` showed the VM with a “Broken” status:

```
❯ limactl list
WARN[0000] instance "example.com" has errors errors="[vz driver is running but host agent is not]"
NAME STATUS SSH VMTYPE ARCH CPUS MEMORY DISK DIR
radicle.com Stopped 127.0.0.1:56224 vz aarch64 4 4GiB 100GiB ~/.lima/radicle.com
example.com Broken 127.0.0.1:52190 vz aarch64 4 4GiB 100GiB ~/.lima/example.com
```

I had rebooted my machine with several VMs running, but only one of them had a “Broken” status

When looking at `~/.lima/example.com/ha.stderr.log`:

```
2026-05-23T11:49:07 Shutting down VZ
2026-05-23T11:49:07 fatal vz: CanRequestStop is not supported
```

Lima’s host agent received SIGTERM but crashed during shutdown without cleaning up `vz.pid`

After reboot, the PID in `vz.pid` gets reassigned to an unrelated process, so Lima’s liveness check returns a false positive & thinks `vz` is still running. Removing the stale pidfile fixes it:

```
rm ~/.lima/example.com/vz.pid
trellis vm start
```

Also added this to the [Trellis docs for troubleshooting](https://roots.io/trellis/docs/troubleshooting/)

---

## Post 2 by @Tetrahedrax — 2026-05-27T08:06:43Z

Yeah I’ve had this happen several times over the past years. I thought I was the only one, so it’s nice to see that my curse is shared.

If you write “trellis vm stop” at this time you get another suggestion for how to fix it.

`limactl stop -f example.com`

After that you can start it like usual with “trellis vm start”

---

## Post 3 by @ben — 2026-05-27T14:29:09Z

Didn’t know the `stop -f` worked! Thanks for letting me know — will change the docs to mention that since it’s a lot cleaner