Sorry if this sounds like a very newbish question but:
What are the commands I need to automate guest shutdowns, guest startups and guest restarts under CentOS 5.3? (in case it helps, cat /proc/version outputs: Linux version 2.6.18-128.1.1.el5 (mockbuild@builder10.centos.org) (gcc version 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44)) #1 SMP Wed Mar 25 18:14:28 EDT 2009)
Specifically, I have inherited a pair of windows server 2003 guests that need to talk to each other and, annoyingly, have a bad habit of forgetting how to do so on a regular basis, with the only established solution being regular restarts. Unfortunately, the software that is causing this problem is legacy custom code and at this point cannot be fixed (and in fact has been largely supplanted by a new web-based equivalent). At this point, I would prefer to just discard the software and its VMs entirely, but it is still required for retrieval of archived data whilst we migrate to the new software mentioned above.
Thus I want to set up a scheduled task (cron job?) to shutdown and power off the first guest, restart the second, then, when the restart is completed, start the first guest again.
Any help gratefully received.