Operations over virtual machines

This article describes the VM operations available to the advanced user. For more information on the administrator's VM operations, see the article Operations with virtual machines of the VMmanager Administrator Guide.

All operations performed in VMmanager can be divided into main and additional. Main operations are called from the VM context menu, additional operations are called on the VM page.

Main operations

The main operations are available in Virtual machines → Menu or in Virtual machines → open a virtual machine page → Menu:

• Start/Stop — start/stop a virtual machine;

  

  If the virtual machine has the status Stopped by the administrator and cannot be started, contact your platform administrator.

• Restart — restart a virtual machine;
• Reinstall — install a new operating system on your virtual machine:
  1. Select an Operating system.
  2. Select Applications and scripts to be launched upon operating system installation. Scripts are to prepare virtual machines for operation. E.g. you can use them to install any software or set up configuration files. Read more in Scripts.
  3. Specify the VM password or click on Generate for an automatically generated password.
  4. To receive an email with the VM access settings, enable the Send email with password option;
• Recovery mode — start/stop the recovery mode;
• Mount ISO-image — mount your own ISO image to the VM;
• VNC — connect to the virtual machine desktop via VNC;
• SPICE — connect to the virtual machine desktop via SPICE;
• Change password — create a new root password for the virtual machine;
• Change resources — change the values of vCPU, RAM and Storage;
• Create a snapshot — create a snapshot of virtual machine. Read more in Snapshots of virtual machines;
• Create backup copy — create a backup copy of virtual machine. Read more in Backups;
• Clone — create a copy of your virtual machine:

  • adds the _cloned prefix to the name;

  • generates a new domain name and MAC address;

  • allocates new IP addresses from the same pool as the original VM;

  • saves all other settings, including owner and password;

  • sets the status to "Stopped"; 

    

    If the IP address of a VM was set manually via the Allocate IP function when creating the VM, cloning of such a VM is not supported.

• Create VM image — create a user image based on the disk of the virtual machine. Read more in Create disk image of virtual machine;
• Run script — select a script that will be started on the virtual machine via the SSH protocol. If necessary, specify the requested script parameters. To interrupt execution of the script, press  in the VM card or the task queue;
• Notes — add notes to a virtual machine;
• Delete — delete a virtual machine.

Additional operations

The additional operations are available in Virtual machines → open a virtual machine page.

Information tab

The tab contains the current system status of the virtual machine:

• Network speed — the speed of incoming and outgoing traffic in Mbit/s;
• vCPU — number of processors in percent;
• RAM in MB;
• Storage in GB.

To change the VM settings, click Edit Resources and enter the desired values. If the platform administrator did not allow increasing resources without rebooting the VM, the VM will be rebooted.

If the platform administrator allowed disk increase without rebooting the VM, you have to manually increase the disk partition after increasing the Storage parameter. The steps depend on the type of the VM file system:

• Linux (EXT4, XFS):
  1. Connect to the VM via SSH.

  2. Install utilities to resize the disk: 

     Debian, Ubuntu

     apt-get install cloud-guest-utils

     BASH

     AlmaLinux

     dnf install cloud-utils-growpart

     BASH

     CentOS

     yum install cloud-utils-growpart

     BASH

  3. Define the partition and file system type: 

     lsblk -f

     BASH

     In the example below, the partition is vda2 and the file system type is EXT4.

     NAME   FSTYPE LABEL UUID                                 MOUNTPOINT
     vda                                                      
     ├─vda1                                                   
     └─vda2 ext4         4a9ea381-1b1c-f135-a540-685a8d3e82f8 /

     BASH

  4. Perform a partition expansion: 

     growpart /dev/<partition_name> <partition_number>

     CODE
      Comments to the command

     <partition_name> — partition name

     <partition_number> — partition number

     For example, for vda2 partition, the command is: growpart /dev/vda 2

  5. Change the file system size:

     EXT4

     resize2fs /dev/<partition>

     BASH

     XFS

     xfs_growfs -d /dev/<partition>

     BASH
      Comments to the commands

     <partition> — partition

• Windows (NTFS):
  1. Connect to the VM via VNC or SPICE.
  2. Change the partition size using the Disk Management tool. Read more in the Microsoft documentation.

Virtual disks tab

For the available functions, see the Managing VM disks article.

Backups tab

For the available functions, see the Backups article.

IP addresses tab

The tab contains the IPs assigned to your virtual machine.

You can choose the type for adding an IPv4 address to a VM. The file to which the network configuration will be written depends on the selected type:

To add a new address:

1. Click on Add an IP address.
2. Select which network the address belongs to — Primary, Secondary or Virtual.
3. For the virtual network, select the User Local Networks.
4. Select the Pool from which the address will be allocated. To select a specific IP address, click Assign IP and enter the desired address.
5. Specify the desired Number of IPv4 addresses.
6. Click Add. VMmanager will change the network settings in the VM operating system automatically.

Network settings tab

The tab contains the settings of the network interfaces of the VM:

• Name;
• IP address;
• MAC address.

Statistics tab

The tab contains the information about the resources consumed by the virtual machine. Here you can specify the period and the type of the resource:

• CPU load;
• RAM consumed;
• Storage consumed;
• Input-output operations (IOPS);
• Incoming traffic speed;
• Outgoing traffic speed.

History tab

The tab contains a log of virtual machine operations launched from VMmanager.

Tasks tab

The tab contains active operations running on the VM. For example, rebooting, installing the OS, etc.

VNC settings tab

The tab contains the data used to connect to a virtual machine via VNC:

• VNC server;
• VNC port;
• Password for access to a VNC server.

Read more in VNC.