Your virtualization platform must be able to shut a KVM guest down gracefully from the hypervisor and to freeze the guest's filesystems briefly so a snapshot is consistent. Which component, installed inside the guest, provides that integration?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 102. Linux installation and package management hard
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The options
Correct qemu-guest-agent
Correct. The agent runs inside the guest and listens on a virtio-serial channel, letting the host request a clean shutdown, a filesystem freeze and thaw around a snapshot, and report the guest's network configuration.
Not correct open-vm-tools
Wrong platform. open-vm-tools is the open source guest tool set for VMware guests and provides the equivalent integration there, not on KVM.
Not correct libvirtd
Wrong side. libvirtd runs on the host and manages the virtual machines; it is the component that would send the request to a guest agent.
Not correct The virtio_blk kernel module
Wrong layer. virtio_blk is the paravirtualized block driver, which speeds up disk I/O but carries no management channel for shutdown or filesystem quiescing.
Why
Guest integration comes in two layers that are easy to conflate. Paravirtualized drivers such as the virtio family handle device I/O, while a guest agent handles management: it accepts commands from the hypervisor over a dedicated channel and executes them inside the running system. Each product ships its own agent, qemu-guest-agent for QEMU/KVM, open-vm-tools for VMware, hyperv-daemons for Hyper-V, and without one the host can only pull the virtual power cord rather than ask the guest to co-operate.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page qemu-ga(8)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 102 and space the ones you get wrong.
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