VM won't do autostart - help needed

[Michal Privoznik]

On 2/17/20 8:20 PM, Yuri Weinstein wrote:
> Thanks Michal!
> 
> See comments in line
> 
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 9:23 AM Michal Privoznik <mprivozn at redhat.com 
> <mailto:mprivozn at redhat.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 2/16/20 10:20 PM, Yuri Weinstein wrote:
>      > I used to have QEMU/KVM and Virtual Machine Manager running on
>     ubuntu
>      > 16.04 and used to start my VM from crontab as:
>      >
>      > @reboot sleep 30 && virsh start WINDOWS10
> 
>     Libvirt has an autostart feature, which can start your domain on the
>     first time libvirtd is started (i.e. during boot).
> 
>     virsh autostart WINDOWS10
> 
>      >
>      > After upgrading to ubuntu 18.04 this stopped working, with error:
>      >
>      > error: failed to get domain 'WINDOWS10'
>      > error: Domain not found: no domain with matching name 'WINDOWS10'
>      >
>      > Running command as "virsh start WINDOWS10" works fine.
>      >
> 
>     This is probably because cron doesn't run the command as root and hence
>     the virsh is no longer connecting to 'qemu:///system' but
>     'qemu:///session'. Change it to:
> 
>     virsh -c qemu:///system start WINDOWS10
> 
> 
> I managed to force austart via Startup App as:
> sh -c "sleep 30 && /usr/bin/virsh start WINDOWS10"
> 
> See your point about using root and/or 'qemu:///system' and will try it.
> 
> 
>     But I suggest using the autostart feature instead.
> 
> 
> This is the main issue - it does not work! :(  Tried via command line and UI
> You can see =>
> Autostart:      enable
> 
> How can this be fixed and/or troubleshooted?

Oh, I've completely missed that. Sorry. What is your libvirt version? 
Since v5.9.0 libvirt will autostart domains exactly once for every boot 
of the host. I mean, when libvirtd is started it will check if 
/var/run/libvirt/qemu/autostarted file exists and if it doesn't, it will 
autostart all qemu domains with autostart enabled. If the file does 
exist then no autostart is attempted.

This usually works as expected - when host boots and starts libvirtd 
service all domains are autostarted. And if libvirtd is restarted 
afterwards no autostart is happening. If host reboots, /var/run should 
be purged and the file with it. Therefore, autostart will be run after 
reboot again.

Under what connection does your domain live? qemu:///system or 
qemu:///session? Because if it is the latter then this won't work - 
session daemon is not started automatically. However, if you are using 
socket activated system daemon, then the daemon is not started on the 
boot only on its first use and therefore autostart will be delayed until 
then.

Michal