How to manually crash your VM on a XenServer

Posted in : Citrix, Hypervisor, Other By Jonas Agblad Translate with Google ⟶

5 years ago

Sometimes you need to simulate or provoke a crash on a Virtual Machine to either verify a problem or get a Memory Dump to have a closer look at whats is happening with the Virtual Machine. The thing is, its quite tricky to do that manually. Lucky for you there is a quite simple way to achieve this on a XenServer and I will show every step of the way.

When your Virtual Machine (VM) is at the desired state you should do the following steps:

Find out the VM ID the XenServer has provided the VM, this changes when rebooted so you need to make sure every time you do this, you cannot use the same ID again. First make note of the Virtual Machine UUID, you can find it under ”General” for the specific VM.

2. Now we need to find out the ID the XenServer provided for this specific VM. Go the the XenServer Console (the host of the VM) and type the following: list_domains

As you can see it lists all the VM on this XenServer, and you will also see the ID provided correlated to the UUID. Make sure you have the correct ID and type the following: xen-hvmcrash <ID> (without the brackets).