Hi, We decided to run the oVirt engine (Oracle flavor) outside the infrastructure. (Medium infrastructure, 10 Hosts, iSCSI storage arrays) We created a second, smaller infrastructure (Single host, local storage) for management (engine) and monitoring (nagios, Dell storage manager etc..) . . This secondary infrastructure's engine runs in the first infrastructure. So, If you picture it, we're facing a "bootstrap" cross-dependency problem where each engine need the other one to start. This is actually a design we had when we were using Xen (Oracle's). Xen provides the "xen create" command to start a VM, even w/o a manager. Bootstrap problem solved. We're moving to oVirt and I understand that oVirt does not support out-of-the-box starting a VM w/o the engine. I've found a workaround that seems to work and would like your advice : - keep a dump of XML of the engine VM # virsh -r dumpxml prodEngine > prodEngine.xml - When necessary use virsh to start the engine # virsh -c qemu:///system?authfile=/etc/ovirt-hosted-engine/virsh_auth.conf create prodEngine.xml The only visible problem is a warning at the VM that was started manually saying "Newer configuration for next run". A restart clears the warning and there's does not seem to be consequences with the VM that had been started from a dump xml. Note : I understand that there is the "self-hosted" engine architecture that solves that "bootstrap" problem. We're no into that for now. We had bad experience with that design in the past.