Installation of the QEMU agent in Linux

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). 

 Installation: 

Linux 

 On Linux you have to simply install the qemu-guest-agent, please refer to the documentation of your system. 

We show here the commands for Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat based systems: 

on Debian/Ubuntu based systems (with apt-get) run: 

apt-get install qemu-guest-agent 

and on Redhat based systems (with yum): 

yum install qemu-guest-agent 

Depending on the distribution, the guest agent might not start automatically after the installation. 

Start it either directly with

systemctl start qemu-guest-agent

Then enable the service to autostart (permanently) if not auto started, with

systemctl enable qemu-guest-agent

(should work for most distributions) or reboot the guest.