I've been playing around with virt-manager. Set up a single vm and enabled autostart, then rebooted the host to test it. It does work, but I can no longer use virt-manager. virt-viewer works, though. 22:17:04,529 (cli:71): virt-manager startup 2012-02-02 22:17:04,530 (virt-manager:292): Launched as: /usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py --debug --no-dbus 2012-02-02 22:17:04,530 (virt-manager:293): GTK version: (2, 18, 9) 2012-02-02 22:17:04,530 (virt-manager:294): virtManager import: <module 'virtManager' from '/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/__init__.pyc'> 2012-02-02 22:17:04,662 (virt-manager:390): Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Failed to connect to socket /tmp/dbus-5jSZbnyIwm: Connection refused) Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py", line 383, in <module> main() File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py", line 315, in main config = virtManager.config.vmmConfig(appname, appversion, glade_dir) File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/config.py", line 96, in __init__ self.conf.add_dir(self.conf_dir, gconf.CLIENT_PRELOAD_NONE) The /tmp dbus socket doesn't exist, but dbus-daemon is running. The only references to this problem I could find were old and unanswered posts to Fedora lists.