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This is my environment:

  1. centos 7 running Gnome with KVM
  2. two virtual machines running centos 7 Gnome desktop

This is what I would like:

Users to log into the any virtual machine from either the LAN or the internet at large (using OpenVPN I would suspect).

I'm not sure where to proceed from here. Do I set up OpenVPN on the host OS or the guest oses (I assume the first).

How would the call in users talk to the virtual machines? I have TightVNC installed but have not yet been able to connect from a windows 7 laptap to any of the virtual machines?

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The questions you are asking are mismatched. OpenVPN is a service to provide a secure, private network to a group of hosts. TightVNC is a remote desktop server and viewer application that you would use to view and possibly control a remote machine that is running a VNC server.

If the end result is you would like users to view and possibly control your guest virtual machines, you will to install and configure a VNC server (tightvnc is fine, there are alternatives such as vino as well) on the guest virtual machines. Note that each machine can internally expect requests on the same ports (5801 and 5901 by default), but you'll need to sort out the port mappings on the VM Host machine. Getting that setup functional should be your first goal.

If you also wish to setup a secure a virtual private network, once your VNC setup is working, you would be best off installing the VPN server on the VM Host OS, and have your remote users authenticate with that host. You don't strictly need to have the guest VMs authenticate on the VPN.

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  • Thanks for the advice. As mentioned, I have the Virtual machines up and running without issue. My current problem now is to access the machines remotely. I have the firewall NATing 5901 to VM1:5901, 5902 to VM:2 5902, etc. I'm kind of stuck since I cannot connect to either of the two machines using a Windows laptop. The connection times out. If I don't NAT, then the connection is refused which gives me some hope that the VMs are being hit. Not sure why the time out. I have zero experience with VNC. The firewall on the VMs is open for the 590x ports.
    – mlewis54
    Jul 18, 2015 at 12:19
  • The first thing I'd look at is to see if the virtual machine host is forwarding ports to the respective guests. If I have machines HOST1, GUEST1, and GUEST2, opening ports 590x on GUEST1/2 doesn't do any good if I don't also forward port HOST1:5901 => GUEST1:5901. For now completely ignore GUEST2 and drop your firewalls until you can establish connectivity between your services. A trick you can use to verify networking is to run netcat in listen mode on tcp port 5901 on GUEST1 and see if any network traffic can get through (just pointing your remote laptop to HOST1:5901 is a sufficient test
    – Stephan
    Jul 20, 2015 at 17:11
  • I am currently forwarding host1:5901 => guest1:5901. One thing I noticed today is the bridge is in the noqueue state of Down when it is supposed to be Up. Not sure how it got this way and not sure how to get it in the up state. Ideas?
    – mlewis54
    Jul 20, 2015 at 20:10

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