I use KVM on two identical centos5 hosts. I can live migrate the virtual machines from one to the other and it works great. Once I do this, I can see VM definitions on both hosts using virt-manager or virsh list --all On one machine the VM is running, on the other it reports "shut off". The disk images are accessible to both host machines and I want to have only one running a the time (of course). If the VM locks up, I could by mistake think that the machine is not running and try to start it on the wrong host. My question is, how can I prevent host A from starting a "shut off" VM that actually has been migrated to host B? The VM could actually be running on any another host. It could also have been crashed. The most simple solution would be some sort of lock file placed next to the disk image location, so seen by all hosts. But perhaps there is another way of working with virt-manager that I am not aware of? Theo