Lifecycle and console

Every machine has the same set of actions, on the Instances list and on the VM detail page.

The actions

Action	What it does
Boot	Start a created or stopped machine
Shutdown	Ask the guest to shut down cleanly
Reboot	Restart the guest
Pause / Resume	Freeze the machine in memory and thaw it again
Power button	Send the equivalent of a physical power button press
Reinstall	Rebuild the machine’s disk from an image, keeping its identity
Delete	Remove the machine and the disks the host owns for it

Reinstall and delete destroy the disk

Reinstall replaces the system disk with a fresh copy of the image. Delete removes the machine along with the disks Virtainer Lite created for it. Data volumes you attached are separate objects and are not deleted with the machine.

States you will see

State	Meaning
Created	Built but never booted
Booting	Started, not yet seen on the network
Running	Started and observed
Stopped	Not running, no host processes left for it
Failed	Something went wrong; the record is kept so you can read why

A failed machine is deliberately left in place. Open it and read the failure reason before deleting anything.

Console

The console gives you the machine’s serial output and a login prompt, which is the right tool when the network is exactly what is broken. Use it to watch a boot, read cloud-init output, or log in when SSH will not connect.

Memory reclaim

Machines are created with memory ballooning enabled. The host automatically reclaims pages the guest has freed, so host memory reflects what guests are actually using rather than the highest they ever reached, and a guest under memory pressure gets its memory back automatically.

You can also reclaim memory from a machine by hand on the VM detail page. Virtainer Lite does not oversubscribe memory on its own: reclaim is an action you take, not a policy that runs behind your back.

Metrics

Each machine keeps its own history of CPU, memory, disk, and network use, over the last hour or the last day. It is stored on the host, so it survives a restart of Virtainer Lite and needs no external monitoring stack to be useful.