14.9.5. Forcing a Guest Virtual Machine to Stop

Force a guest virtual machine to stop with the virsh destroy command:

# virsh destroy {domain-id, domain-name or domain-uuid} [--graceful]

This command does an immediate ungraceful shutdown and stops the specified guest virtual machine. Using virsh destroy can corrupt guest virtual machine file systems. Use the destroy option only when the guest virtual machine is unresponsive. If you want to initiate a graceful shutdown, use the virsh destroy --graceful command.