AlmaLinux 8.6 : Automatically shutdown guest machines on virtual host

Support
1

I have setup an AlmaLinux 8.6 server as a virtualisation host. I want to know what the default behavior is when you restart the virtual host.

Also how would I customise the server to suspend certain guests on reboot/shutdown or shutdown certain guests on reboot/shutdown?

2

that’s what libvirtd and libvirt-guests is for - starts guests configured to autostart on boot, and suspends them on shutdown.

3

I have changed the configuration file but the server does not wait for guest to shutdown when issuing a reboot command. Here’s my configuration setting:
ON_SHUTDOWN=shutdown
PARALLEL_SHUTDOWN=3
SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT=3600

4

Guest services wasn’t enabled. It needed systemctl enable --now libvirt-guests.service. This time the virtual host does appear to be waiting for the guest to shutdown.

However, the guest does not appear to have shutdown gracefully. I can’t see any shutdown commands with last -x -F shutdown. Is there a way to determine if server was shut arruptly?

5

Actually, it does shutdown gracefully on one machine. The other machine is running D3 and AlmaLinux is having issues shutting down the service. I guess the host ends up forcefully terminating the guest due to it taking too long.