Run Strategies

Overview

VirtualMachines have a Running setting that determines whether or not there should be a guest running or not. Because KubeVirt will always immediately restart a VirtualMachineInstance for VirtualMachines with spec.running: true, a simple boolean is not always enough to fully describe desired behavior. For instance, there are cases when a user would like the ability to shut down a guest from inside the virtual machine. With spec.running: true, KubeVirt would immediately restart the VirtualMachineInstance.

RunStrategy

To allow for greater variation of user states, the RunStrategy field has been introduced. This is mutually exclusive with Running as they have somewhat overlapping conditions. There are currently four RunStrategies defined:

• Always: A VirtualMachineInstance will always be present. If the VirtualMachineInstance crashed, a new one will be spawned. This is the same behavior as spec.running: true.

• RerunOnFailure: A VirtualMachineInstance will be respawned if the previous instance failed in an error state. It will not be re-created if the guest stopped successfully (e.g. shut down from inside guest).

• Manual: The presence of a VirtualMachineInstance or lack thereof is controlled exclusively by the start/stop/restart VirtualMachine subresource endpoints.

• Halted: No VirtualMachineInstance will be present. If a guest is already running, it will be stopped. This is the same behavior as spec.running: false.

Note: RunStrategy and Running are mutually exclusive, because they can be contradictory. The API server will reject VirtualMachine resources that define both.

Virtctl

The start, stop and restart methods of virtctl will invoke their respective subresources of VirtualMachines. This can have an effect on the runStrategy of the VirtualMachine as below:

RunStrategy	start	stop	restart
Always	-	Halted	Always
RerunOnFailure	-	Halted	RerunOnFailure
Manual	Manual	Manual	Manual
Halted	Always	-	-

Table entries marked with - don't make sense, so won't have an effect on RunStrategy.

RunStrategy Examples

Always

An example usage of the Always RunStrategy.

apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1alpha3
kind: VirtualMachine
metadata:
  labels:
    kubevirt.io/vm: vm-cirros
  name: vm-cirros
spec:
  runStrategy: Always
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        kubevirt.io/vm: vm-cirros
    spec:
      domain:
        devices:
          disks:
          - disk:
              bus: virtio
            name: containerdisk
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0
      volumes:
      - containerDisk:
          image: kubevirt/cirros-container-disk-demo:latest
        name: containerdisk