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.