Halting a KVM guest with virsh

KVM is great but I’m making a note so I remember because this command gives me pause every time. When a new VM has no OS or doesn’t make it past the bootloader it appears to be non-responsive for the graceful shutdown command.

Sometimes shutdown in the virtual shell for KVM fails.

virsh # shutdown myvm
Domain myvm is being shutdown

But…

114 myvm            running

In order to shutdown this host I use the ‘destroy’ command. Destroy does not remove any files or otherwise permanently change the host data. Which for me, is unintuitive. It does remove it from the list of hosts shown with the ‘list’ command. Destroy is like pulling the plug.

virsh #destroy myvm

The command that does what I would expect destroy to do is: ‘undefine’.