Dear all,

I've asked this question already in another forum, but got no reply, unfortunately. So I'm asking here again.

Is it possible to create virtual machines without root permissions?

When trying to start a machine defined as not-privileged user, the error message is: Network not found: no network with matching name 'default'. default is only listed when logged in as root.

When trying to define a network as user: cannot write config file '/var/lib/libvirt/dnsmasq/chris.hostsfile' Permission denied.

The distribution is CentOS 6.3.

Thank you in advance!

Chris

PS: It is possible, with virt-manager GUI, but it isn't work from the shell until now...

You can configure libvirt to run under its own user, not root (if its not the default setup). But you still need root access to do the setup initially. Another thing is that you have to make sure your user in the same group as the libvirt user and that group to have full access to the log files, etc.

So the default setup is running as root? It seems possible to configure VMs with virt-manager as user, so I was surprised by the shell errors. In VirtualBox I can use all shell commands as user. Since it's only a little local setup I'll use root for the time being...

The setup i was referring to is to change the config options in libvirt. After that it should work from user level.