[libvirt-users] behaviour of "virsh shutdown domainName"

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 06:08:05PM +0100, Jorge Somavilla wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am experiencing some problems with different versions of libvirt
> (0.7.5 and 0.7.7), with a kvm (WinXP), host running Ubuntu 9.10, and i
> would like to ask you two questions:
> 
> - In virsh, after running the command "shutdown domainName", what
> should be the final state of the domain, if the shutdown finishes
> correctly: "shutoff", "no-state", "inactive", or the domain shouldn't
> show in "list --all" (full clean-up)?

There are two types of guest in libvirt

 - persistent - they have a config file stored on disk
 - transient - no config file & only exist while running


If you run 'shutdown' on a  persistent guest, the final state should
be 'shutoff'. For a transient guest, it will go away completely not
ever visible again.

NB, 'shutdown' is merely a *request* to shutdown. There is no
guarentee that the guest OS will honour this request. If it does
not, then you will have to kill the guest forcefully (virsh destroy)
which removes the virtual power plug.


> - After the command "shutdown domainName", should i be able to run the
> command "start domainName", without first defining the domain? (i.e.:
> does shutdown "undefine" the domain?).

No, shutdown is merely a request to shutdown. It won't touch the
configs on disk. You will also have to watch to see if it actually
shuts down before you can run start again.

> In my experience 0.7.5 used to leave the shut down domains as defined,
> so i could run "start" right after. Testing in other hosts this
> doesn't work always like that, and even if the domain apparently shuts
> down correctly, the domain sometimes shows in "list --all", and
> sometimes it doesn't. With libvirt 0.7.7 the domain never shows in
> "list --all" after a successful shutdown, which makes me think it was
> a bug and it has been corrected. Am i missing anything?

To best of my knowledge, there is no change in semantics between these
two versions.

Daniel
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