Script: Shutting Down All Xen VMs on a Server

Shutting down servers is a common operations for managing a cluster. However, if this server is configured to a Xen Dom0 and has Xen VMs (DomUs), the VMs should be shutdown first to avoid data lost on these VMs.

xm supports a -a option to shutdown all VMs:

# xm shutdown -a

Add the -w if you want to make it wait for the domain to complete shutdown before returning

Thanks to Eugene for this tips. The script below is a “poor man”‘s solution.

I wrote a Bash script to automatically list all running VMs and shutdown them down by calling xm which I use to shutdown VMs on servers before turning them off.

The xen-shutdown-all.sh script is on github:

xen-shutdown-all.sh.

This script use the xm command for management. If you are using a newer version of Xen which possibly uses xl for VM management, you can easily change the script by replacing xm with xl and make other possibly required changes.

Enjoy!