Sharing (Bridged?) connection with host

I have a silverblue setup with virt-manager layered on top.

From all the guides and tutorials I can see, they all set up a bridge network to the ethernet port to give the VMs network accessibility.

However the ethernet then cannot be used by the host machine. Is there a way to share the ethernet connection between both?

If it’s just to give internet access to your VMs (and not the reverse: making them available from the internet) then the default which use NAT forwarding should work just fine.

Thanks for the reply.

I want to also be able to access the VM, one is a homeassistant VM.

On Windows a virtual nic was created to share the connection. I have read mentions of virtual-nics online on linux aswell, but no clarity if that is the way or how to create them - in those guides they already existed.

You probably want libvirt: Virtual Networking then

I have tried that but for me I cant see any difference between NAT and routed.

In virt-manager I have virbr0 as NAT and virbr1 as Route. Without bridging virbr1 to the ethernet connection, it appears to work the same as virbr0. If I ad bridging then the connection cannot be used for the desktop.

I use workstation and not silverblue, but what I do is use the default virbr0 with bridged networking from the vm. I then can access the vm from the host and vice-versa. The vm also still uses NAT for access to the internet as long as forwarding is enabled on the host (it is by default)

This does require one additional thing for the rest of my LAN to access the VM, and that is I need to add a route on the gateway to direct all traffic for the subnet (or discrete IP) used by the VMs to the host IP.

Nothing else is needed in my config, and even on silverblue the same should work.

I do not bridge directly to the host external interface, but only to the virbr0 virtual interface.