XenServer emergency shutdown

Olivier Lambert

• 1 min read

Imagine you lost electrical power for your whole IT room.

Luckily, you got an UPS[1], and that's great. But what if power doesn't come back before the batteries are depleted?

You have a limited amount of time to shutdown your XenServer hosts, and you probably don't want to lose your existing sessions probably stored in RAM.

That's for this scenario we created the Emergency shutdown feature in Xen Orchestra!

On the host view, clicking on this button will trigger the Emergency shutdown procedure:

  1. All running VMs will be suspended (think it's like "hibernate" on your laptop: the RAM will be stored in the storage repository).
  2. Only after this, the host will be halted.

Here, all the running VMs are being suspended:

And finally, that's it:

Now the host is being halted automatically.

When the power outage is finished?

  1. Start your host.
  2. All your VM could be resumed, even your RAM will be preserved and in the exact same state before the power outage.

  1. uninterruptible power supply ↩︎