[Discuss] gracefully shutdown guests

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

Around fedora 16 or so, they disabled the acpi power button.  There are some hoops you can jump through to re-enable it, but the only result you can get is an interactive prompt, while a user is logged in.  There's isn't any option to unconditionally shutdown, and there isn't any option to do it while nobody's logged in.

This is a bummer for me, because I have VM hosts with a bunch of guests, and for all the other machines, I use the acpi power button to gracefully shutdown guests, when the host wants them to shutdown.  But hey.

Question for you guys:  What do you use to signal guests for graceful shutdown?

I know esx does it via vmware-tools.  But I'm looking for alternatives (because I'm running virtualbox.)

I never heard of this "libvirt" thing before today.  I spent something like an hour looking into it, couldn't figure out what the heck it's supposed to do, or how it's supposed to do it.  Decided to quit wasting time and move on...

I suppose I could use ssh, but that's very hoakey.  And dependent on DNS and network being up, and other variables.

And those are about all the alternatives that I know of ...