Shutting down VM on physical machine reboot (QEMU) [SOLVED]

[jerann]

I have an Athlon 64 X2 desktop here at home that runs 64-bit Gentoo; I use it primarily as a file/web server. I wanted to install a 32-bit Gentoo VM on the server, so I followed the directions here and got everything working. I'm starting the VM with the kvm command using the vnc switch, and I put a script to start the VM on boot in /etc/local.d so it would automatically boot the vm whenever I boot the server. The server rarely gets shut down or rebooted, but it occurred to me that every time I shut down the physical server, it'll be sort of like pulling the plug on the VM. I've always held that you shouldn't do that on a physical machine... is that bad? Should I try to rig some method to issue a shutdown command to the VM? This is the first time I've managed to set up a virtual machine, so I'm pretty inexperienced on that aspect of it.

[Telemin]

Hi Jerann,

Usually it is considered a BadIdea(Tm) to kill a machine without warning, virtual or physical. Killing a VM without warning doesn't necessarily have the same filesystem damage implications as killing a physical system (although I imagine that still depends on implementation (others please correct me)) but you get no guarantees of anything, and lose any work in progress.

Have you considered using a script to save the VM state on shutdown and check for a statefile on startup? Take a look at the KVM site there are if I remember some scripts that have already been written for such things.

You may also want to take a look at libvirt/virsh, I never used it myself but it sounds like it might be what you are after. Google is your friend on that one:)

-Telemin-
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[jerann]

[newtonian]

This is what I did to get auto shutdown working for kvm gentoo client virtual domains:


On the KVM Host: