Chapitre 6. Shutting down virtual machines

To shut down a running virtual machine hosted on RHEL 9, use the command line interface or the web console GUI.

6.1. Shutting down a virtual machine using the command-line interface

To shut down a responsive virtual machine (VM), do one of the following:

  • Use a shutdown command appropriate to the guest OS while connected to the guest.

  • Use the virsh shutdown command on the host:

    • If the VM is on a local host: 

      # virsh shutdown demo-guest1
Domain 'demo-guest1' is being shutdown

    • If the VM is on a remote host, in this example 10.0.0.1: 

      # virsh -c qemu+ssh://root@10.0.0.1/system shutdown demo-guest1

root@10.0.0.1's password:
Domain 'demo-guest1' is being shutdown

To force a VM to shut down, for example if it has become unresponsive, use the virsh destroy command on the host: 

# virsh destroy demo-guest1
Domain 'demo-guest1' destroyed
Note

The virsh destroy command does not actually delete or remove the VM configuration or disk images. It only terminates the running VM instance of the VM, similarly to pulling the power cord from a physical machine. As such, in rare cases, virsh destroy may cause corruption of the VM’s file system, so using this command is only recommended if all other shutdown methods have failed.