How do I use “virsh shutdown” on KVM domains to shut down Ubuntu guests?

Question

I am using various KVM domains on a Ubuntu server. Both the host and guests run 10.04.1, 2.6.32-24 kernel, virsh reports version 0.7.5, KVM 0.12.3. The guests boot automatically when the host boots and they have <features><acpi/><features> in their configuration.

I could never manage to make virsh shutdown MyDomain on the host to have any effect. It responds with Domain MyDomain is being shutdown and the domain keeps happily running. virsh list still lists them in the state running.

virsh destroy MyDomain works fine, but of course that's not really what I want, so most of the time I log into each one and shut them down manually, which is pretty annoying.

I couldn't really find any information on how virsh shutdown tries to shut the domain down. Pointers to useful bits of documentation are welcome.

What could cause this? How is it supposed to work?

Answer 1

Check to see if you have the package acpid installed on each of the guests.

I generally create new virtual machines using VMBuilder with the parameter --addpkg acpid and the only time I've had trouble shutting down Ubuntu guests using virsh was when the guest vm had crashed in some way.