22 Jan 2012

How to Shut Down a Virtual Machine which is Unresponsive in the Pending or Amber State in XenServer 5.x ->

Written by Thomas Poppelgaard on. Posted in XenServer

Summary

This article describes how to shut down a virtual machine, which is in a pending state (or amber state), from the XenServer control domain.

Requirements

You require the following components:

Console session to the XenServer control domain

Intermediate Linux / XenServer administration skills

Background

Sometimes, when you initiate a shutdown or a reboot from the XenCenter, the virtual machine is in an unresponsive state when it is in the pending state (or amber state), and the task being performed is also in an unresponsive state.

The xe-toolstack-restart refreshes all tasks and displays the virtual machine to be in a running state, but the virtual machine would not be available or be responding.

Basically the process(dom-id) associated with the virtual machine is unresponsive in the XenServer control domain. The only method to recover is to terminate the dom-id for the virtual machine or reboot the XenServer.

Procedure

To shut down a virtual machine, which is in an amber state from XenServer control domain, complete the following procedure:

Select the virtual machine in XenCenter and check the general tab to obtain the UUID of the virtual machine, which is in an unresponsive state:

Run the following command to check the dom-id of the virtual machine in the XenServer control domain:
list_domains | grep <UUID from step1>
Following is a sample of the preceding command:
[root@Xen6 ~]# list_domains | grep bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6
Output :
51 | bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6 | H
51 – the dom-id of the VM
bcdb1445-1f28-9600-ae84-53c254167ae6 – UUID of the VM
H – state of the virtual machine (H indicates that this is a HVM guest, typically it means this is a Windows virtual machine.)
Refer to the Knowledge Center article CTX127896 – How to Use the XenServer Xentop Utility for more information about the other possible Virtual Machine states.