After a host reboot

A host reboot stops everything. When Virtainer Lite starts again it rebuilds machines from what it recorded before, so a reboot is an interruption rather than a rebuild.

What comes back

Before the reboot	After
Running	Rebuilt and started, keeping its MAC address, so the guest keeps the same IP
Created but never booted	Rebuilt, not started, ready to boot
Stopped	Left stopped
Stopped by you	Never started automatically

Turning off VM autostart in Settings changes the first row only: machines that were running come back stopped, and you start them when you are ready. Everything else behaves the same.

Restarting Virtainer Lite is not the same as rebooting the host

Upgrading or restarting Virtainer Lite leaves running machines alone. Only a host reboot tears them down and requires this recovery.

Checking what happened

The startup log records the reconcile and recovery passes, including how many machines were attempted, recovered, failed, or skipped:

journalctl -u virtainer-lite

When something did not come back

What you see	What to do	Why
A machine is Failed	Read its failure reason, fix the host problem, boot it again. Delete and recreate if it will not recover	Rebuilding it failed partway
Machines skipped, disk missing	Restore the disk from backup and boot, or delete the record and recreate	The disk file is gone, and no empty disk was put in its place
Everything running is now Stopped	Boot what you need, or turn VM autostart back on	VM autostart is off. The setting working, not a fault
Running but guest unreachable	Open its console and read the boot output	The guest did not come up on the network. One never observed is eventually marked failed
Unexpectedly Stopped	Boot it again	It was reaped at startup as an orphan of a previous failed start

A missing disk is never replaced automatically

Recreating an empty disk would produce a machine that boots and looks healthy while all its data is gone. Virtainer Lite would rather show you a failure.

What is not covered

Recovery only restores this host’s machines. Moving workloads to another host after a failure is clustering, which belongs to Virtainer Basic, not to Lite.