Save state and close like Virtualbox?

[nraygun]

I'm new to unRaid and liking it so far!

I created a couple of VMs for some specific tasks and I'll only run them when I need them. Previously I was just running Virtualbox on my Linux box and firing them up when I needed them, then I would close it which would save the machine state and shutdown the VM.

Is there an equivalent to this in unRaid? Right now, I'm just doing a graceful shutdown in the VMs to shut them down, then restarting them when I need. I'd rather just pick up where I left off last instead of waiting for the VM to boot up again.

I tried putting the VMs in Paused state, but then when I restart my unRaid server, they come back as Stopped?

Is there a way to shutdown unRaid VMs and save their state so they can simply be restored from the saved state later? And are snapshots supported?

(I'll keep Googling around in the meantime)

[testdasi]

Unraid doesn't have Snapshots.

[nraygun]

21 hours ago, testdasi said:

Unraid doesn't have Snapshots.

How about handling of VMs in general? Should I just shut them down after I'm done with it?

[PCwhale]

Sorry, this might be a bit of a late reply but if your VM OS supports hibernation then Unraid does not need to support save and pause, its not as fast but its definitly faster then traditional boot and will save all your work. I have set all my virtual machines (i use ubuntu and windows mostly) to detect "power" button press to be hibernation instead of power off. This will make the Virtual Machine OS go into hibernation and save its RAM content to the non volatile disk storage.

When unraid tells machines to turn off, it is aware of the state of the virtual machine so it wont force shut it down before ram is cached to storage. The same will happen when you tell unraid to shut down, it will automatically tell all the virtual machines that the "power button" has been pressed and they will start hibernating. 

Comes in very handy when unraid runs on a boot schedual. my server turns off at night and starts in the morning automatically to lower power bills. i hate losing work so hibernation is pefect.

only thing i wish unraid had is actual virtual checkpoints, so that i could save/load states when doing risky changes like in HyperV

[jkexbx]

On 4/3/2020 at 12:08 PM, PCwhale said:

Sorry, this might be a bit of a late reply but if your VM OS supports hibernation then Unraid does not need to support save and pause, its not as fast but its definitly faster then traditional boot and will save all your work. I have set all my virtual machines (i use ubuntu and windows mostly) to detect "power" button press to be hibernation instead of power off. This will make the Virtual Machine OS go into hibernation and save its RAM content to the non volatile disk storage.

When unraid tells machines to turn off, it is aware of the state of the virtual machine so it wont force shut it down before ram is cached to storage. The same will happen when you tell unraid to shut down, it will automatically tell all the virtual machines that the "power button" has been pressed and they will start hibernating. 

Comes in very handy when unraid runs on a boot schedual. my server turns off at night and starts in the morning automatically to lower power bills. i hate losing work so hibernation is pefect.

only thing i wish unraid had is actual virtual checkpoints, so that i could save/load states when doing risky changes like in HyperV

How did you setup your ubuntu machines to hibernate?