Kali inside QEMU/LibVirt with virt-manager (Guest VM)

We understand there are a lot of options for interfacing with KVM and QEMU to create different VMs, however for the purposes of this guide we will be using the most common option.

To get a Debian based system prepared for this, we can simply run the following command:

:~$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install virt-manager -y
[...]

This will pull in all of the necessary packages and will allow us to create our VM just fine.

After virt-manager is installed, we can launch it and put in our password as we need elevated permissions for some tasks.

From here we can select the “+” and begin to create our VM:

We want to ensure we select local ISO file:

We choose our ISO and also de-select guessing the OS and input “Debian 11”:

We make sure to use 2GB of memory and 2 CPU cores:

We set our system to be 20GB:

We can now finalize setup by changing the system name to “kali-linux”:

From here we can follow the normal Kali Linux installation