Hi Tom, As someone who suggested to you that you should try this mailing list, I would like to quote some of the discussions that have taken place in the main mailing list ( http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2010-March/091654.html ). > $ export LIBVIRT_DEBUG=2 > $ virsh list > 14:21:06.532: error : No vport operation path found for host0 > 14:21:06.550: error : No vport operation path found for host4 > 14:21:06.555: error : No vport operation path found for host3 > 14:21:06.598: error : No vport operation path found for host1 > 14:21:06.599: error : No vport operation path found for host2 > 14:21:06.615: info : No security driver available > Id Name State > ---------------------------------- This is empty because, as a non-root user, you are looking at qemu:///session instead of qemu:///system. To be able to access the latter, you would need to do some tweaking. I wrote: [quote] Look into /etc/libvirt/libvirtd.conf and check out the section "UNIX socket access controls" and make appropriate adjustment. [ I created group 'libvirt' , added myself to the group, and uncommented the line "unix_sock_group = "libvirt"".] Then adjust also the permission bits of the directories and files in /var/run/libvirt to allow access to the group libvirt. With some luck, you should be able to run the virsh command (for example): virsh -c qemu:///system list --all [/quote] Then you wrote: [quote] I read about that on libvirt.org but chose not to make any changes since the Xen server already works with the same config I have on the KVM server. I understood libvirt to be a layer that lets one compatible tool work with many different hypervisors, so I didn't think I'd need to change my libvirt config to work with KVM if it already works with Xen. That might be a bad assumption, though, and I'm not wedded to it. :) [/quote] This is understandable. However, xen and kvm are different in certain places. For instance, /var/run/libvirt/qemu is unique to kvm, so making changes to this should not affect your xen configuration. <- someone please confirm this. I wrote: [quote] Also, if you create a guest with the -c qemu:///session option, that would allow non-root user to connect to it. [/quote] My understanding is that with the -c qemu:///session option, the guest will be set up in that user's directory. Therefore, no root privilege is required. Comments/help from people who are familiar with kvm welcome. :) Akemi