2010/7/16 George Goh <georgegoh(a)spodon.com&gt;: You quoted a paragraph that describes what the driver does internally while defining a new domain. This paragraph is there because the way it works internally has implications on how you have to specify disk devices in the domain XML. It has nothing to do with the way you define a new domain in general. Defining a new domain using virsh works as with any other backend supported by libvirt. 1) Create a domain XML config file test1.xml containing this example config (assuming the default local datastore named 'Storage1' and the default virtual port group named 'VM Network'): <domain type='vmware'> <name>test1</name> <memory>524288</memory> <currentMemory>524288</currentMemory> <vcpu>1</vcpu> <os> <type arch='i686'>hvm</type> </os> <devices> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <source file='[Storage1] test1/test1.vmdk'/> <target dev='sda' bus='scsi'/> <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/> </disk> <disk type='file' device='cdrom'> <source file='[Storage1] iso/Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso'/> <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/> <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/> </disk> <controller type='scsi' index='0'/> <controller type='ide' index='0'/> <interface type='bridge'> <source bridge='VM Network'/> </interface> </devices> </domain> 2) Start virsh: virsh -c esx://example-esx-server.com/?no_verify=1 3) At the virsh prompt execute a define command: define /path/to/test1.xml Currently this requires that you manually created the .vmdk file '[Storage1] test1/test1.vmdk' before. I'm currently working on the libvirt storage management for ESX. I expect that libvirt 0.8.3 will be able to create new .vmdk files in an ESX datastore. Matthias