[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager][PATCH ] Add option to control whether to leave VM running when closing console.

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Jul 01, 2013 at 02:18:27PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> On 06/28/2013 01:49 PM, Leonardo Garcia wrote:
> > From: Leonardo Garcia <lagarcia at br.ibm.com>
> > 
> > It is sometimes counter intuitive for a desktop user that the virtual machine
> > continues to run when they left the console viewer application. They are used
> > that when they close an application all the resources being used by it are also
> > freed up, and from their perspective, the console viewer is just one more
> > application running.
> 
> Hmm, I don't know if I buy this. Closing a VNC client window doesn't shut down
> the remote machine, nor does exiting an SSH connection. And doing virt-manager
> --uuid <blah> doesn't auto-start an inactive VM so users are forced to
> recognize this concept IMO.
> 
> There's also the issue that reliably shutting down a VM in a safe way is hard:
> shutdown often doesn't do what's expected, and destroy is potentially
> dangerous. If we just kick off 'shutdown' on exit then the user may not notice
> for a long time that the VM never shut down.

FWIW, on exit, GNOME Boxes will  either suspend all VMs, or do a managed
save on them.  It definitely makes sense from Boxes POV, since it is trying
not to expose "VM" as concept/object that the user needs to manage. They just
have a number of operating systems they can interact with.

I think this POV doesn't really make sense to virt-manager though, since it
is really about exposing virtual machine management. In addition, virt-manager
is not tied to a single machine, it can manage arbitrary machines & it definitely
does not make sense to suspend VMs when disconnecting from any remote host.

> I think I'd be more comfortable with just recommending a wrapper script if
> someone really wants this functionality, it's basically:

I'd suggest that people just use GNOME Boxes if they want this kind of
UI interaction model for their VMs.  Different use case, different app.

Daniel
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