2011/3/8 john alexander sanabria ordonez <john.sanabria(a)correounivalle.edu.co&gt;: Currently that's an unsolved problem. The connection string is considered to be public information, and libvirt doesn't support passing secret information like a password via the connection string because of this. That's the reason why only virsh -c gsx://root@ic-p19-01?no_verify=1 is supported, but the following isn't virsh -c gsx://root:password@ic-p19-01?no_verify=1 VMware ESX supports login via SSPI pass-through authentication. This allows to login to an ESX server using your already authenticated Windows session. The problem with SSPI is that it's Windows specific and requires a domain controller, as far as I have understood it. For non-Windows systems there is login via username and password only. Currently libvirt support passing the username in the connection string only. There is no mechanism to automatically pass the password as well, yet. One possibility could be to store the password in plaintext in your home directory. For example in ~/.libvirt/credentials or maybe more specific to the ESX driver as in ~/.libvirt/esx/credentials. The format of the file could look like this # <challenge>:<username>:<password> ic-p19-01:root:password 192.168.5.10:root:f00baR But storing passwords in plaintext isn't such a good idea. On the other hand I don't see other options for automated login. Matthias