Solution to VM missing from Virtual Machine Manager

Submitted by John on Wed, 2012-04-18 12:57

I restarted a standalone KVM host running RHEL6 and when I opened Virtual Machine Manager, my guest virtual machine wasn't listed at all.

Eek!

Turns out I had been messing around with the XML definition in /etc/libvirt/qemu/machinename.xml (I know, I know...consider my hand slapped) and broke it. Fortunately /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log was kind enough to let me know what went wrong:

error : catchXMLError:653 : at line 33: Opening and ending tag mismatch: source line 32 and disk

I freaked out again after I asked virsh to list my virtual machines and the domain was not listed -- it was an empty list:

# virsh list
Id Name                 State
----------------------------------

Turns out it's just inactive, since it couldn't start up, since I broke the configuration file.

# virsh list --inactive
Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  - machinename.example.com shut off

I repaired the XML configuration and made sure the the VM was set to autostart on reboot:

# virsh autostart machinename.example.com
Domain machinename.example.com marked as autostarted

Adrenaline level dropping fast.

Topic: 
RHEL6
KVM