virt-manager with X11 forwarding

Sometimes you just wanna see your machines in virt-manager, and the console is handy, too, right? virsh is awesome and all, but, sometimes I just like having the GUI. For me with a default CentOS 7 minimal install and using oooq (Triple-O Quick start) there’s a few extra steps that I needed.

First things first, if you ssh to your box with x11 forwarding like so:

ssh -Y stack@eendracht

But, I’d get a

X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0

So I found out that I needed to change /etc/ssh/sshd_config specifically I needed to have this line:

X11UseLocalhost no

And I also needed to install xauth

sudo yum install -y xauth

And then systemctl restart sshd, and… again

ssh -Y stack@eendracht
virt-manager

And away you go! But, tip and word to the wise… With virt-manager, it’s not going to look for your “user session” by default. So go ahead and in virt-manager GUI go and browse to “File -> Add Connection…” and from there in “Hypervisor” dropdown choose the “QEMU/KVM user session”. Now you should see the hosts that oooq created under the stack user.

I used to like to just use the virt-manager local to my machine and use an SSH session, however, I haven’t yet found a way to directly do that AND also use the user session.