remote virt-viewer on the command line?

Question

Do I need to configure GRUB and make other alterations, or might there be some equivalent to virt-viewer which is strictly CLI?

My thinking is that "whatever" virt-viewer is doing, through whatever "magic" it achieves that, should, conceivably, be available through the CLI without invoking the GUI.

All it seems to be doing is running a sort of GUI version of a console, or virtual console, of some variety. When I google how to get a bash type prompt from with virsh there's mention of configuring bridge networking, or different, for me, fairly involved procedures.

For my purposes, virt-viewer fits the bill -- except that it seemingly requires, or utilizes, the GUI. For a strictly CLI it gets more involved?

This is in the context of using SSH to remotely login to the host which is why GUI options, such as how virtviewer` seems to work, wouldn't fit.

something perhaps like:

"It can be used remotely (from a third machine, typically your workstation) if the host does not have graphical display."

but how?

Basically want to chain virt-viewer with ssh to remotely login to AWS host in order to then use virt-viewer remotely. If that makes sense.

Answer 1

virt-viewer is a GUI tool, full stop. It requires a graphical desktop to function.

If you want to access a guest while logged in to the host machine directly, you'll need to connect via a console port.

Alternatively, you can run virt-viewer or virt-manager on your local machine and connect remotely via SSH (as in your provided answer). This is best done with key-based authentication as SSH password-auth may result in numerous login prompts from virt-viewer (one for each channel, of which there are several for any given connection [usb/display/cursor/inputs/etc.]).

Note that you do not need to install virt-viewer or virt-manager on the host machine, as these tools communicate directly with libvirt.

Answer 2

Untested answer:

virt-viewer --connect qemu+ssh://root@kvm.home.barfoo.org:222/system guest