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 Proxmox VE, 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 Host
You have to enable the guest-agent per VM, either set it in the GUI to “Yes” under options (see screenshot):
or via CLI:
qm set VMID --agent 1
Guest 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:
