16.6. virt-rescue: The Rescue Shell

This section describes virt-rescue, which can be considered analogous to a rescue CD for virtual machines. It boots a guest virtual machine into a rescue shell so that maintenance can be performed to correct errors and the guest virtual machine can be repaired.

There is some overlap between virt-rescue and guestfish. It is important to distinguish their differing uses. virt-rescue is for making interactive, ad-hoc changes using ordinary Linux file system tools. It is particularly suited to rescuing a guest virtual machine that has failed . virt-rescue cannot be scripted.

In contrast, guestfish is particularly useful for making scripted, structured changes through a formal set of commands (the libguestfs API), although it can also be used interactively.