virsh won’t let me query information, but I do know the vm names I wish to start and I have a simple ssh shell on the host machine. So lets give it a shot.

So you want to setup networking so virtual machines will have access to the outside world through your hosts network connection. To do this you’ll need to share your host’s external interface with virtual machines through a bridge. A bridge can join two network segments and be used to inspect all Ethernet frames that pass between them. Create a bridge and a tunnel interface. Assign the tunnel and your host’s Ethernet interface to the bridge. Connect the bridge to the outside world. Your host uses the network card in promiscuous mode to handle packets for other interfaces connected to the bridge.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine architecture on a different machine architecture. This is different than VMware, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V where you’re running different operating systems on the same architecture.

Use the following steps to get an image of a HP Thin Client running as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. I’m running Fedora 11 and VirtualBox 3.0.0 r49315. The thin client is running a stripped down Debian Etchnhalf (no ‘less’ pager command, man pages?!) And finally, if you log in with root or another user, you’ll get to a full xfce desktop