Michal Prívozník Now virsh list works! cephfs? I can see two possible sources for the problem: My storage is hard mounted in fstab. This works and it does mount on boot. # fstab on hypervisor user@.mynamefs-01=/ /data ceph noatime,_netdev 0 0 usern@.mynamefs-02=/ /data2 ceph noatime,_netdev 0 0 was NFS/iSCSI and the server wasn't responding then libvirtd would just hang). I agree with NFS/cephfs or any storage over the network if its not available libvirtd defined pools will cause problems. typically) libvirt assumes they are always 'running'. And proceeds to enumerate volumes in that pool (i.e. files under the dir). And if there's a stale mount point, this might stuck libvirtd. But again, this is not limited to ceph, any network FS might do this. In my case I built this hypervisor using cephfs as my primary storage for virtualmachines over the past year. Its has worked until recently. Recently I had issue with my ceph which likely caused a stale mount. In the past if the storage went offline, after fixing the issue I had no problems and my virualmachines came back to life. In the current case I found: * cephfs working as normal. healthy. * hypervisors mounting using fstab as usual. * libvirtd starts normally no errors (even with cephfs mounted) * virsh fails to connect to libvirt when the cephfs is mounted. If I umount /cephfs, and systemctl restart libvirtd. virsh works! Example "virsh list" , "virsh version" ..etc. I am going to try and maybe delete the iso pools I have. One interesting thing I found yesterday after I restart the hypervisor and try umount /cephfs, libvirtd has one of my pools locked and opened. Its the pool with iso in it. I know someone in a previous response to me mentioned they had issues with iso being stored on cephfs and libvirtd. In order for me to umount /cephfs I have to stop all libvirtd services(livrtd, libvirtd.socket .. ro .. and admin). This makes sense libvirtd has defined pools in my cephfs. thanks jerry