"RLR" wrote:

> > > The only drawback I've encountered running on VMware is that it's easy
> > > to corrupt the virtual disk with an improper shutdown. VMware
> > > provides tools that let the host OS do that safely for supported guest
> > > OS's. Is there some workaround for that?
> >
> > You can certainly arrange for your virtual OSR5 to be shut down on
> > demand. That is, if you _know_ you are shutting down the virtualization
> > environment, you can take steps at the same time to shut down the VMs
> > even if they are not going to be able to respond to internal signals
> > from the virtualization environment.
> >
> > What's that mean?
> >
> > At the crudest level, it means: before you shutdown VMware, login to the
> > OSR5 VM as root and shut it down manually.
> >
> > What refinements can you make on that?
> >
> > Well, you can shutdown the OSR5 box remotely by doing:
> >
> > ssh root@osr5vm shutdown -g0 -y # or whatever
>
> Shutting down the guest OS is not a sufficient condition to prevent
> corruption of the virtual disk.

I don't follow. If you shut down the guest OS and then the
virtualization environment, the result is the same as when shutting down
a non-virtualized OS on a physical machine.

Do you mean that you have to shut down the applications on the guest OS
first? Sure, that's true -- and if you've set things up correctly, that
should happen as part of the shutdown sequence. That is, you should
have shutdown scripts in /etc/rc0.d/... which shut down your apps in a
controlled manner, precisely so that initiating a shutdown from the OS
level leaves everything in a good state.

If you don't have that, then the proper shutdown sequence (from the
perspective of a remote machine) becomes:

ssh root@osr5vm command-to-shut-down-app-1
ssh root@osr5vm command-to-shut-down-app-2
sleep xxx # some amount of time known sufficient for those to complete
# unless there is some more active way to tell they're down
ssh root@osr5vm shutdown -g0 -y # or whatever
... shut down virtualization environment ...

All of this is identical to how you would shut down a physical machine,
only substituting "power off the hardware" in place of "shut down
virtualization environment".

>Bela<