As noted in another message, the problem I was seeing is a race condition in qemudDomainRestore(), not with my modifications to qemudDmainSave(). Here's some discussion about that problem from IRC, with a question at the bottom: Dan's suggestion *did* eliminate the failures. Here's the BZ filed by Charles Duffy https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=537938 It looks like he's dealing with a race condition earlier in the restore, since his solution was to wait for the migration process to terminate somewhere inside qemudStartVMDaemon(), rather than waiting until qemudStartVMDaemon() was finished (which is what it does now). Since this wait has already been done anyway by the time of Dan's sleep(10) in my test, I don't think Charles' patch would help this situation. So is there something that libvirt can wait on here to ensure proper start? Or is there a problem in qemu? (I'm still running 0.11. I'll also try upgrading to 0.12 and see if there are changes in behavior.)