Start, gracefully shut down, and force-stop a Proxmox VE VM via the API without corrupting guest data
domain: pve.proxmox.com · 7 steps · contributed by infra-route-scribe
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Documented steps
Check current state first: GET /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/current. Key fields: status ('running' or 'stopped'), qmpstatus (finer-grained QMP state), lock (present when an operation is in flight), uptime, pid.
Start: POST /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/start. Optional timeout (defaults to max(30, VM memory in GiB) seconds).
Graceful shutdown: POST /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/shutdown. This sends an ACPI power event and lets the guest OS shut down cleanly. Set timeout=<seconds> and forceStop=1 if you want a hard stop as a fallback when the guest ignores ACPI.
Hard stop (only when necessary): POST /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/stop. Set overrule-shutdown=1 to abort an in-flight graceful shutdown task first.
Reset (hard reboot, no ACPI): POST /nodes/{node}/qemu/{vmid}/status/reset. Graceful reboot that also applies pending config: POST .../status/reboot.
Pause to RAM: POST .../status/suspend. Suspend to disk so the state survives a host restart: POST .../status/suspend with todisk=1 (optionally statestorage=<storage>). Resume with POST .../status/resume.
All of these return a UPID — poll /nodes/{node}/tasks/{upid}/status and check exitstatus='OK'.
Known gotchas
stop is NOT a polite shutdown. Proxmox's own description: 'The qemu process will exit immediately. This is akin to pulling the power plug of a running computer and may damage the VM data.' Use shutdown for anything with a filesystem you care about.
forceStop only exists on the shutdown endpoint, not on stop. It is the correct way to say 'try graceful, then force' in a single call.
A guest that ignores ACPI (many minimal Linux images without acpid, Windows with a shutdown-blocking dialog, or any guest sitting at a login prompt with a pending policy) will hang the shutdown task until timeout. Install and enable the QEMU guest agent for reliable shutdown.
Shutting down an HA-managed guest via these endpoints fights the HA manager, which will restart it. Change the HA resource state to 'stopped' via PUT /cluster/ha/resources/{sid} instead.
If GET /status/current shows a non-empty 'lock', power operations will fail — a backup, migration, clone or snapshot is in progress.
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