What is best practice for KVM virt-manager?

For those of you who are using KVM with virt-manager on remote systems: what is the best practices for login?

At the moment I just have a server in my basement and I'm using the virt-manager on my laptop, logging in via ssh. But I hate the idea of allowing root ssh logins... what are the steps to create a user specifically for this purpose? Or does KVM require too many 'root' permissions to operate, for this to work?

ETA: thanks, everyone! It never occurred to me that I could use PolicyKit to allow permissions for non-root users. I also found this site, which is a step-by-step tutorial on setting up KVM and granting permissions:

http://itscblog.tamu.edu/startup-guide-for-kvm-on-centos-6/