Hi anthonyv, I have been having the same problem and had been searching around for ages but couldn't find any answers. But after lots of experimenting I found the problem... as expected "human error"...

The problem was that I had blindly gone through the installation guide and not fully read the steps.

In the online guide ( http://docs.openstack.org/icehouse/install-guide/install/yum/content/nova-compute.html (http://docs.openstack.org/icehouse/in...) ) part 6. says to run the following on your compute node:

egrep -c '(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo

• If this returns a 0 then "virt_type = qemu" should be set in the nova.conf configuration of the compute node.
• If this returns any number higher then "virt_type = kvm" should be set in the nova.conf configuration of the compute node.

On my compute nodes I had set "virt_type = qemu" even though the previous command returned a high number. As soon as I changed this to kvm all my instances started working.

I hope this helps for you.