On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 2:45 PM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


> Although the KVM solution discussed here may work, the description of this
> in operation appears to be a true
> hypervisor even when only used to run, say, MS Windows as an application
> environment virtual machine under SL. That is, this solution is not the
> same "in spirit" as is VirtualBox. On a hard 802.3 wired connection,
> VirtualBox does provide Internet access to the outside world from the guest;
> this seems to be a failure on a 802.11 ISP wifi connection. JHas anyone
> used VMware-Player-12.0.0-2985596.x86_64.bundle on a SL7 host with a MS Win
> guest?

I don't see why you think that VirtualBox and VMware aren't
hypervisors like KVM.


> If so, is the "free" version stripped of sufficient features as not to be
> useful in a "production" environment? I do not need merely to look at
> pretty pictures of a running guest environment; I need to access the
> Internet. to share files (e.g., docx, pptx, etc.) between the Linux host and
> the MS Windows guest, and to access both USB devices and the DVD drive of
> the host on the guest.
>
> My institution cannot afford the US$249 for the VMware Workstation license,
> and I cannot justify the expenditure of research funds. However, VMware
> player is licensed for free for non-commercial private use (mine).
>
> I do note that my query on the failure of VirtualBox to work with 802.11
> host Linux networks and thus supply a connection to the guest OS within
> VirtualBox now has had 46 views on the VirtualBox Linux host "forum" without
> a reply -- evidently, this is a problem with the current VirtualBox for
> which no one has a viable solution -- hence my interest in VMware Player.

You cannot bridge a wireless NIC:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/bridge#It_doesn.27t_work_with_my_Wireless_card.21

It's been disabled in the kernel's bridging code since 2.6.34 (AFAIR).

There are web sites that show how to get around this limitation via
either ebtables or proxy-arp. I've never tried either but I assume
that, since VirtualBox and VMware allow it, they must use a similar
workaround under the cover.

I launch VMs with "qemu-system-x86_64 ... -netdev
bridge,br=bridge0,id=net0 ..." on my laptop without adding my wireless
NIC to br0 and I set up forwarding of a VM's packets with:

# echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
and
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wifi0 -j MASQUERADE
or
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.0.2.0/24 ! -d 10.0.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

If you use libvirt, define a "routed" network with virsh, and choose
it when you create a VM, virt-install sets up the forwarding
automatically.

You haven't said whether you want to be able to access VMs from
another box but, FYI, I can ssh to VMs from another laptop by running
"ip ro add 10.0.2.0/24 via 192.168.1.43 dev wifi0" on that laptop,
where 192.168.1.43 is the ip address of the laptop hosting the VMs.