On Wed, May 02, 2018 at 04:05:05PM +0000, Stallard, Adam wrote: Hi Adam, First of all, never modify/delete/create these files manually, they are libvirt internal files and you should use libvirt APIs or virsh. You can easily achieve that by pre-creating guest and network XML definitions by hand or generate guest XML on a different machine using virt-install and store them somewhere on your host as a template. The following steps will add that guest into libvirt: - define new guest: $ virsh define /path/to/guest.xml - start existing guest: $ virsh start guest - to set the guest to start on host boot: $ virsh autostart guest To have the guests automatically handled on host reboot/poweroff you can use libvirt-guests service. The configuration file is </etc/sysconfig/libvirt-guests>. There are also virsh commands to manipulate networks: $ virsh help network libvirt has to be the one to start QEMU process in order to have it managed by libvirt. About avoiding python in the host, you will always have python installed because it is required by yum and I'm kind of surprised that installing virt-install package drags in some conflicting python dependencies. The list of packages is quite small: $ yum install virt-install Installing: virt-install Installing for dependencies: libarchive libosinfo libvirt-python osinfo-db osinfo-db-tools python-backports python-backports-ssl_match_hostname python-ipaddr python-requests python-six python-urllib3 virt-manager-common You don't have to install virt-manager package, that's the GUI part of virt-manager project and that one requires a lot of packages. Pavel