Thanks Lorin hadn't seen that, OpenStack development is fast but the novaclient is the fastest.... Samuel if you want to play with the latest & greatest client (and you have pip installed)this is how I fetch it: sudo pip install -e git+https://github.com/openstack/python-novaclient.git#egg=python-novaclient My old way with nova-manage still seems to work for Essex anyway, though the new nova client way seems better as you can set multiple keys at once -Jon