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Guests (CHARON virtual machines) are managed as a service. This allows for starting and stopping guests on user or services, this menu option allows you to start and stop them on your or on system request (Linux server boot & shutdown).

The service works with a guests list containing the emulator executable file name, configuration file and, optionally, the auto_boot on server startup ( at service level, not same as SRM console level) on server startup parameters:

Startup: the virtual machine is executed in detached mode (using ‘-d’ parameter) and then requires the console to be set as virtual serial line.
- Connection to the console will be performed using telnet on defined localhost / port. This can also be performed using other utilities like putty. If there is more than one guest on the server, guests are started in parallel.
- Before the guest starts, the network interfaces used will be checked and all the offload parameters will be set offline
Shutdown: a common shutdown script can be created for guests shutdown. See "Service management - Create/Edit guest stop script" for details.
- If the script does not exist, the virtual machine process is killed without proper guest shutdown.
- If the script exists, it executes the customer defined command lines to perform a proper shutdown (using ‘ssh’ or ‘expect’ tool for example). If the virtual machine process is still running after execution, the stop operation is considered as failed so for Linux systems not using systemd (Red Hat 6) the script must stop the emulator either by sending a “power off” at SRM prompt (AXP) or F6 key (VAX) with ‘expect’ or just by killing the process. For Linux systems using systemd (Red Hat 7 and Fedora), the process is killed by the system.
- If there is more than one guest on the server, guests are stopped in sequential mode based on their order in the guests list. This order can be modified from the menu: this is valid only for Linux systems not using systemd (Red Hat 6), for other systems, the services description files will have to be modified to add dependencies using Before= or After= for example. For more information, see manpages: # man systemd.unit