I use Proxmox for my virtualization needs, but there are other use case that I have to run a VM on my NAS. My first choice is to use Cockpit, but I could not get the Cockpit working with Leap 15.2. Cockpit only supports Tumbleweed and the available community repos do not work either.
The next best thing I could find for UI is Virtual Machine Manager or virt-manager. The only complaint that I have is it requires a thick client which is the virt-manager. Also, openSUSE seems to like their own default wicked manager. I tried to use the network-manager, but I could not get the console working.
The way remote access works is it uses SSH as the transport to access the server. First, we need to install the KVM server and KVM tools on the server running openSUSE Leap. Once installed, enable and start libvirtd.
zypper install -y patterns-server-kvm_server patterns-server-kvm_tools systemctl enable --now libvirtd
At this point, you can manage you VM need via the virsh commands, but we are going to be using virt-manager. To install virt-manager:
zypper install virt-manager
Now, on the client such as laptop or desktop computer, to access the virt-manager we would need to install virt-manager. I am using Fedora as my workstation. Adjust based on your OS. I also need to install openssh-askpass; otherwise, virt-manager would not let us use SSH.
dnf install virt-manager openssh-askpass
Once done, we can open the virt-manager UI.
- Navigate to File > Add connection
- Select QEMU/KVM in the Hypervisor drop-down menu
- Mark the box for Connect to remote host over SSH
- Enter the username to use
- Enter the IP address or hostname of the server in the Hostname field
- Mark the checkbox to autoconnect
- Click Connect
If it prompt for SSH fingerprint, enter yes then enter the server password then click OK as shown in Figure 2.
Once done, you should see something similar to Figure 3.
This is it. From here on, you should be able to access the virt-manager that was installed on the server via the laptop or desktop virt-manager thick client. Cheers!