Take a checkpoint from inside of qemu

[Leek, Jim]

I'm running CentOS 8 inside qemu via virt-manager.  I would like a program running on the virtual machine to be able to trigger a savevm command on it's own VM.  (This is for debugging purposes on the program being run in the VM.) 

The only way I can think of to do this is to have the program trigger a script that ssh's out of the guest, to the host, to trigger the savevm command.  Something like this:

guest$ ssh <host> "virsh qemu-monitor-command --hmp centos8_1 'savevm savestate1'"

Is there any more straightforward method available?

Thanks,

Jim