[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager][PATCH ] Add option to control whether to leave VM running when closing console.

Cole Robinson crobinso at redhat.com
Mon Jul 1 18:18:27 UTC 2013


On 06/28/2013 01:49 PM, Leonardo Garcia wrote:
> From: Leonardo Garcia <lagarcia at br.ibm.com>
> 
> It is sometimes counter intuitive for a desktop user that the virtual machine
> continues to run when they left the console viewer application. They are used
> that when they close an application all the resources being used by it are also
> freed up, and from their perspective, the console viewer is just one more
> application running.

Hmm, I don't know if I buy this. Closing a VNC client window doesn't shut down
the remote machine, nor does exiting an SSH connection. And doing virt-manager
--uuid <blah> doesn't auto-start an inactive VM so users are forced to
recognize this concept IMO.

There's also the issue that reliably shutting down a VM in a safe way is hard:
shutdown often doesn't do what's expected, and destroy is potentially
dangerous. If we just kick off 'shutdown' on exit then the user may not notice
for a long time that the VM never shut down.

I think I'd be more comfortable with just recommending a wrapper script if
someone really wants this functionality, it's basically:

virsh start <vmname>
virt-manager --no-fork --uuid $(virsh domuuid <vmname>)
virsh destroy <vmname>

- Cole




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