On Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:51:42 +0100 Kenni Lund wrote:
If the user should be able to restart a crashed guest, you have to design the system outside of the guest, as you've already described.
Yep. At work we have a gazillion virtual machines for testing on different linux distros, and I cobbled up a web cgi interface folks who need a particular machine can use to reserve it and have the cgi script run a virsh create command for them or a script to shutdown the machine (which first tries clean shutdown and if that doesn't work, does virsh destroy).
Something similar with the addition of some sort of authentication layer could let users goto a web site and login to shutdown, reboot, etc. their own machine. There must be canned examples for web page login laying around on the web.