I just ran into an issue where I had about 30 guests get duplicate mac addresses assigned. These were scattered across 30 different machines. Some debugging revealed that: 1) All the host machines were restarted within a couple seconds of each other 2) All the host machines had fairly similar libvirtd pids (within ~100 PIDs of each other) 3) Libvirt seeds the RNG using 'time(NULL) ^ getpid()' This perfectly explains why I saw so many duplicate mac addresses. Why is the RNG seed such a predictable value? Surely there has to be a better source of a random seed then the timestamp and the pid? The PID seems to me to be a very bad source of any randomness. I just ran a test across 60 of our hosts. 43 of them shared their PID with at least one other machine.