On 01/25/2012 04:34 PM, Ken Coar wrote: Libvirt has startup hooks; if the hook fails, the domain won't be started. So you could write a hook that checks if the domain about to be started is on your black-list because you are in the middle of some other operation on the disk image. You do have to restart libvirtd to recognize a newly added hook, though. http://libvirt.org/hooks.html Libvirt also has the ability to interact with the sanlock file lock manager; if you configure libvirt to use the lock manager, and then you can independently take out a lease on a disk image, then you can lock out libvirt from starting any domain with that image. http://libvirt.org/locking.html -- Eric Blake eblake(a)redhat.com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org