kvm virtualization and external access to guest OS on ubuntu 9.04

Question

I want to access my guest OS by ssh and not by ugly GUI that's provided by virt-manager. How do I enable guest OS to be accessible externally ? All I found was to configure bridge interface and did some tweaks in config files. There are two probles:

• It seems that I already have bridge interface:

  virbr0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 3e:1a:ac:69:b3:36
  inet addr:192.168.122.1 Bcast:192.168.122.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::3c1a:acff:fe69:b336/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:8027 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:1592237 (1.5 MB)

  Do I need to configure another one ?

• All information I found about tweaking config files was relevant to ubuntu 8.10 but I have ubuntu 9.04 and config files layout is a bit different.

Is there any step-by-step guide for configuring external access to KVM guests in ubuntu 9.04 ?

Answer 1

there is no need for anything specific. if you have a bridge device, which is supposed to replace the eth config, then the virtual NICs of the VMs are attached to that bridge, much like you would attach VMs to a v-switch on VMWare ESX.

after that it's just simple networking to ssh into the VM - sshd must be running and port 22 must be accessible.

I'm njo expert on Ubuntu, but it does work on my Fedora box and on my RHEL systems.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/HOWTO

Answer 2

Ubuntu has a good guide on KVM networking and setting up a bridged interface at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Networking