Looking for any pointers anyone may have to introduce a delayed start for KVM guests i.e. 30 seconds between starting each virtual server rather than starting them all at once which thrashes the disks and actually just ends up taking a lot longer to get everything settled.
The approach I have tried is to update /etc/sysconfig/libvirt-guests as follows:
# URIs to check for running guests
# example: URIS='default xen:/// vbox+tcp://host/system lxc:///'
#URIS=default
# action taken on host boot
# - start all guests which were running on shutdown are started on boot
# regardless on their autostart settings
# - ignore libvirt-guests init script won't start any guest on boot, however,
# guests marked as autostart will still be automatically started by
# libvirtd
ON_BOOT=ignore
# Number of seconds to wait between each guest start. Set to 0 to allow
# parallel startup.
START_DELAY=180
# action taken on host shutdown
# - suspend all running guests are suspended using virsh managedsave
# - shutdown all running guests are asked to shutdown. Please be careful with
# this settings since there is no way to distinguish between a
# guest which is stuck or ignores shutdown requests and a guest
# which just needs a long time to shutdown. When setting
# ON_SHUTDOWN=shutdown, you must also set SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT to a
# value suitable for your guests.
ON_SHUTDOWN=shutdown
# If set to non-zero, shutdown will suspend guests concurrently. Number of
# guests on shutdown at any time will not exceed number set in this variable.
#PARALLEL_SHUTDOWN=0
# Number of seconds we're willing to wait for a guest to shut down. If parallel
# shutdown is enabled, this timeout applies as a timeout for shutting down all
# guests on a single URI defined in the variable URIS. If this is 0, then there
# is no time out (use with caution, as guests might not respond to a shutdown
# request). The default value is 300 seconds (5 minutes).
#SHUTDOWN_TIMEOUT=300
# If non-zero, try to bypass the file system cache when saving and
# restoring guests, even though this may give slower operation for
# some file systems.
#BYPASS_CACHE=0
I have verified the default URIs path in libvirt.conf is correct also and have tried changing the default in the above config file to qemu:///system & qemu:///
All the guests boot at the same time regardless of changes made.
I have also tried removing the contents of /etc/libvirt/qemu/autostart/ incase the symbolic links were overriding the libvirt-guests config however nothing starts then (not surprising).
Anyone got this working or have an alternate method?
I am aware I could redirect the emulator path to introduce a delay within a script however this would impact the creation of new guests which is not an option.
thanks.
