On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 13:32, Harald Dunkel <harald.dunkel(a)aixigo.de&gt; wrote: AFAIK there is no such option. in domain XML you can change <emulator> tag and point to your script, which will start domain after some random delay e.g. something like this: <domain type='kvm'> <name>test</name> ... <devices> <emulator>/usr/bin/local/qemu-kvm-with-random-delay</emulator> <devices> </domain> # cat > /usr/bin/local/qemu-kvm-with-random-delay #!/bin/bash # delay running of virtual machine by 0-9 seconds sleep $(( $RANDOM % 10 )) exec /usr/bin/qemu-kvm $* ^D You can also detect if domain is started by libvirtd autostart feature or not. it could be enough that you will check if [ -f /var/lock/subsys/libvirtd ]. But I've not tested. If you'll have some solution share with us, please. -- Pawel

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 04:23:54PM +0100, Paweł Krześniak wrote: my solution was to make all my domains non-persistent. my application monitors the status of the domains and re-creates them if they disappear. this has some major advantages: 1) you can control the rate at which domains are started 2) you can restart domains if they crash 3) you can schedule tasks to perform on a domain when they're not running (in the interval between when a domain goes down and when your application brings it back up) 4) peace of mind -- you know for sure that random domains won't start up when you bring up a random machine. this helps avoid vm disk corruption. this reason will be less important once libvirt finalizes the locking infrastructure, but right now it's critical for me --igor