Save qemu VM state like in Virtualbox

Question

I am used to the Virtualbox "save machine state" exit strategy, which is a handy way to let the host reboot without shutting down the vm.

I recently switched to qemu because of its VT-x in VT-x support, necessary for VS2015 emulators, and missing in Virtualbox.

I can handle the commandline startup, but what I haven't been able to do succesfully is to save a VM's state that can be later booted up and resumed. How can I do this? Note that libvirt's virtual machine manager is not an option as I can't seem to install the networking firewall dependencies (nor does it seem necessary, so I don't really want to). I'm running Arch Linux.

Solution

You can use the "savevm" and "loadvm" command in the qemu monitor. The entire state of the machine is saved, exactly as in virtualbox. The only caveat is that the drive image file has to be in qcow2 format. You can find out more about qemu monitor from the following site: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Monitor#savevm

Comments

[Adrian Lopez]

I think it's worth to mention that qcow2 can be easily converted to any other format if you ever need it.