> I do not see a way to start vm's in the event that an engine is down. I see
> vdsClient -s 0 destroy works to shut them down.

Yes, engine is SPOF. They invented hosted engine solution which pretends
to bringe HA for engine but...

I have no idea why it does not use JBoss based features like clustering.

> Also, is it still possible to use non-read-only virsh commands? i tried using
> saslpasswd2 to create an account, but that did not seem to work.

You are doing something wrong then. Auth for virsh works ok, you just
have to know how libvirt works with that sasl :)

# grep ^sasldb /etc/sasl2/libvirt.conf
sasldb_path: /etc/libvirt/passwd.db

# saslpasswd2 -c -a libvirt testovic
...
# strings /etc/libvirt/passwd.db | grep ^testovic
testovic

j.