Virtualization and Host Wireless

English Virtualization
1

Been doing some research whether there are new options providing Internet access to virtualized Guests running on Hosts with wireless (WiFi).

  1. I don’t notice any existing threads on this topic in this forum, but if anyone is doing it, what method(s) are you using?
  2. I came across a relatively new kernel driver called macvtap which is supposed to provide this capability… It was introduced sometime 2010 and of course as a standard kernel driver is actively supported. AFAIK latest vulnerability discovered Apr 2012, latest patch update Sept 2012 as of this post.

Has anyone been bridging virtualization guests through a Host’s WiFi connection?

Has anyone played around with macvtap?

On my newly built machine, am setting up
openSUSE 12.2
KDE

KVM
QEMU
virt-manager
LXC

Will be implementing more parts of OpenStack afterwards.

TIA,
TSU

2

Update:
Looks like KVM automatically sets up a Guest wired connection to any available Host network, including wireless.

Note “bridged” seems to actually setup a NAT behind the Host, the Guest is configured on a private Host network, not on the Host physical network.

TSU

3

Update, hopefully final for now in this thread.

Have determined that configuring Bridged Networking on a wireless Host is not easily configured but likely is rarely desireable anyway.

The most likely best configuration will be setup automatically <if no custom virtual networks are configured>. This forces User Mode Networking which makes the Guest(s) NAT clients behind the Host.

This is desireable because it generally means the Guests can be launched and running regardless whether an Internet connection exists or not(eg on a laptop which will move from network to network and might not be connected). If an Internet connection exists, then the Guests can also access the Internet. Of course like any other NAT “outside clients” wouldn’t normally be able to connect to your Guests.

An issue which might be specific only to my machine that requires further investigation, until I configured a virtual network at least temporarily, VNC (aka virt viewer) did not work. Only a few other reported instances on the Web, may not be a widespread anomaly.

This more or less reflects my personal preferences running VMware on a laptop, too.

HTH,
TSU