Forcing a xenserver vm to shutdown

Forcing a xenserver vm to shutdown is sometimes required if a vm’s active reboot or shutdown task refuses to complete correctly.

You’ve tried restarting a xenserver vm and it appears to be stuck with the orange circle icon next to the vm and the force restart/shutdown options are not available, so the vm is stuck in a bit of a limbo, you can’t restart it you cant shut it down, the vm itself generally is not running…. So now what!?

In order to get things going again you need to delve in the console and kill the vm’s task.

1/ Take a note of the vm’s uuid by clicking on the vm and hitting the general tab then right click on the uuid and select copy. Paste the contents into notepad or something similar for easy reference.

2/ On the home server running the vm open the console and type list_domains. Take a note of the ID number that is next to the uuid of the vm noted earlier (in this case the id is 1).

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3/ navigate to /opt/xensource/debug then type “destroy_domain -domid 1” replace 1 with your own domain ID.

The vm will then be forced to shutdown, note that whilst there is no real alternative to this method if you find yourself in this situation is it the same yanking out the power cable on the vm so it is always a good idea to wait a reasonable amount of time before performing these actions to make sure that the vm will not shutdown on its own.

Author: Dale Scriven