Automatic Daily Operations

It is possible to configure automatic daily cleaning operations. You may want to keep the system from having idle virtual machines. Using the Ravada CLI you can stop or hibernate machines at a given time.

Cron

We use the cron utility to execute operations at a given time. If you are not familiar with this consult the system documentation typing man cron or any other online manual.

To configure the cron entries type this from the host console:

sudo crontab -e

Usage

The most usual operation is to hibernate or shutdown all the inactive virtual machines at night. All the users that have an active connection will not be affected.

Also, any virtual machine marked as auto start will be kept running.

Examples

Hibernate disconnected

This cron entry will hibernate all virtual machines that have disconnected the remote viewer. This will be executed at 4 AM in the morning each day.

00 04 * * * /usr/sbin/rvd_back --hibernate --disconnected

Hibernate active

That will hibernate any active virtual machine. This will be executed at 4 AM in the morning in weekdays.

00 04 * * mon-fri /usr/sbin/rvd_back --hibernate --active

Shutdown or Hibernate

You can use shutdown in the previous examples instead of hibernate. The main difference is hibernated machines must dump all the memory to disk and use large amounts of space in the server.

Other usage

The commands that can be issued are:

  • shutdown

  • hibernate

The modifiers to list virtual machines are:

  • active

  • disconnected

  • all