Install Qemu Guest Agent Windows

The qemu-guest-agent is a helper daemon, which is installed in the guest. It is used to exchange information between the host and guest, and to execute command in the guest.

In the EdgeUno Cloud, the qemu-guest-agent is used for mainly two things:

• To properly shutdown the guest, instead of relying on ACPI commands or windows policies
• To freeze the guest file system when making a backup (on windows, use the volume shadow copy service VSS).

Windows

First, you have to download the virtio-win driver iso (see Windows VirtIO Drivers).

You can find the iso available in our system to be installed. If you buy a VPS with Windows pre-installed the agent is already installed.

Then install the virtio-serial driver:

1. Attach the ISO to your windows VM (virtio-*.iso)
2. Go to the windows Device Manager
3. Look for "PCI Simple Communications Controller"
4. Right Click -> Update Driver and select on the mounted iso in DRIVE:\vioserial\<OSVERSION>\ where <OSVERSION> is your Windows Version (e.g. 2k12R2 for Windows 2012 R2)

After that, you have to install the qemu-guest-agent:

1. Go to the mounted ISO in explorer
2. The guest agent installer is in the directory guest-agent
3. Execute the installer with double click (either qemu-ga-x86_64.msi (64-bit) or qemu-ga-i386.msi (32-bit)

Or we can install the quemu and driver as follows

Once we have the ISO, it is mounted on the system and the ISO is loaded from the Hardware section on the hardware CD/DVD of the virtual machine: 

 When mapping the ISO will appear on the Windows system: 

We launch the installation of virtio-win-guest-tools: 

All drivers will be installed and with this you also install the qemu-guest-agent of virtio 

We will already have all the devices with the corresponding driver: 

Finally, We recommend shutting down the server instead of restarting it for the changes to take effect.