VM fails to shut down

[TwoFour]

When I try to shut down a VM that is installing a Windows guest, it does not shut down or reset:



Not even after it completed installation and rebooted, when I am in the ESC BIOS:



How do we recover from a rogue guests running wild and refusing to shut down? This is dangerous.

 

[Daniel_Dog]

Did you check the qemu-agent box when you created the VM?

If so then guest-tools need to be installed for the shutdown option to work as it will do it via guest-tools. Try the stop option. (As it should work even if guest-tools is not installed but qemu-agent is checked.)

 

[Moayad]

Hi,

You have to install and enable the Qemu-Guest-Agent [0]


[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Qemu-guest-agent

 

[TwoFour]

Did you check the qemu-agent box when you created the VM?

The guest is not installed yet. It is being installed. As in in progress.

 

[tnicholson]

The guest is not installed yet. It is being installed. As in in progress.

So the guest-agent is not installed yet if I understand correctly? Shutdown can only work correctly if the guest agent is installed and running. If you really want to stop the VM during the Windows install, just use the Stop option - this works regardless of guest agent and is somewhat equivalent to just pulling the plug of a physical machine.

 

[TwoFour]

I must have used a wrong term. I am not looking to gracefully shut the guest OS down. I want to power off the VM but it is not powering off and stays running.

 

[tnicholson]

The stop command can also fail if there are other shutdown/reboot tasks pending, so check if there are any other tasks running and stop them if need be.

If that doesn't help and you really just want to force the VM to stop, you can simply kill the kvm process of the VM:

1) First find out the process ID of the VM:

ps aux | grep "/usr/bin/kvm -id <insert vmid here>"

2) Then kill the process

kill -9 <process id>

 

[TwoFour]

Thanks for the thought. Having seen all of this, I went vsphere way.