Module 11 - Pausing VMs¶

Historical miniclass

This lesson was recovered from the former Sandia minimega site. It is preserved for reference and may describe obsolete software, operating systems, commands, or external resources. Consult the current documentation before applying it.

View the archived source URL.

Introduction¶

Now we have some virtual machines running, you are probably wondering "How do we connect to them?"

Pausing and Starting a VM¶

Let's first start some VMs

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm kill all
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm flush
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm launch kvm test[1-3]
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm start all

Now let's stop one of those VMs

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm stop test1
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ .columns id,name,state,memory vm info
host   | id | name        | state   | memory
ubuntu | 0  | test1       | PAUSED  | 128
ubuntu | 1  | test2       | RUNNING | 128
ubuntu | 1  | test2       | RUNNING | 128

And let's start it back up

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm start test1
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ .columns id,name,state,memory vm info
host   | id | name        | state   | memory
ubuntu | 0  | test1       | RUNNING | 128
ubuntu | 1  | test2       | RUNNING | 128
ubuntu | 1  | test2       | RUNNING | 128

Migrating a VM¶

You can tell minimega where to save that paused state file using the vm migrate command. And then at a later time boot from it.

First, let's connect to the VNC from the website and do something to the VM so we know it wasn't just rebooted. Such as opening a window.

Image of vmm1.png

Now let's save the state to a file

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm migrate test2 thisisatest

Now let's go ahead and kill everything

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm kill all
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm flush
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ .columns id,name,state,memory vm info

Now lets restore the state of that vm we captured from earlier

minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ clear vm config
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm config migrate /tmp/minimega/files/thisisatest
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm config memory 128
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm config cdrom /home/ubuntu/tinycore.iso
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm launch kvm thisisatest
minimega:/tmp/minimega/minimega$ vm start thisisatest

Image of vmm2.png