I believe that with older versions of libvirt you need to uncomment the following lines in /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf # The user ID for QEMU processes run by the system instance. user = "root" # The group ID for QEMU processes run by the system instance. group = "root" I'd also check what's in /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack/attachments/20130401/217d418a/attachment.html>