[libvirt-users] libvirtd loses all of its data after restart

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 07:27:23PM +0200, guido wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm having a problem with libvirtd (backend being kvm) losing its if I restart 
> it with /etc/init.d/libvirtd restart.
> 
> What I did was:
>  Start libvirtd
>  Connect to it using virsh
>  Create a new storage pool with pool-create-as
>  Create some volumes with vol-create-as
>  Create some virtual machines with create
>  Restart libvirtd using /etc/init.d/libvirtd restart
>  Reconnect with virsh
> 
> After this, all the previously defined pools, volumes and virtual machines 
> would no longer be listed with pool-list or list, respectively. (list --all 
> doesn't show anything either)
> The virtual machines I had started earlier are still running and I can still 
> connect to them using vnc, but obviously, I can no longer manage them using 
> libvirt.
> 
> Why is this happening? Is libvirtd's data not supposed to be persistent? Is 
> this maybe just an old bug? How can I get the still running virtual machines 
> back under control?
> 
> The system I'm using for this is a recently installed CentOS 5.4 with 
> libvirt-0.6.3-20.1.el5_4 installed directly from its package repository. The 
> only changes I made from the vanilla install was to install and configure some 
> SSL certs in /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf, as described on the libvirt website 
> and to enable LIBVIRTD_ARGS="--listen" in /etc/sysconfig/libvirtd.

The version of libvirtd you have does not support seemless restarts of
the daemon  process while resources are active. You should shutdown all
guests / storage pools before restarting the libvirtd daemon, or better
yet, don't restart it at all.

libvirt 0.7.x was the first series supporting restarts with stuff running


Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London    -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org -o- http://virt-manager.org -o- http://deltacloud.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org        -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|