Distinguishing between host and guest initiated VM shutdown

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 10:35:22PM +0200, Milan Zamazal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we have a problem in oVirt that highly available VMs don't restart after
> host poweroff because Vdsm identifies the case as a user initiated
> shutdown (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1800966).
> 
> When poweroff is run on the host, libvirt-guests service takes an
> action.

If oVirt is initiating a graceful host shutdown, then surely it already
knows what VMs it has running on the host at that time, and so has enough
info to restart them later.

>            `virsh shutdown' is run on the VM, the guest OS is shut down
> cleanly and libvirt reports a shutdown event with
> VIR_DOMAIN_EVENT_SHUTDOWN_GUEST detail.  Although it is a host initiated
> shutdown actually.
> 
> Does libvirt provide any means to distinguish this case from a regular
> user shutdown?

A "virsh shutdown" merely triggers a request to the guest OS to start
a guest initiated shutdown. As such it is indistinguishable from an
administrator initiating the same thing inside the guest.

Regards,
Daniel
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