[ale] Virtual networks

[Dustin Strickland]

     My understanding of networking does not extend past physical 
interfaces. I have a Wheezy VM host that runs many different services 
for my LAN; OS testing, various database, LDAP, web, etc. servers. 
Currently all running under KVM. All of the VMs aside from OS testing 
are connected to a virtual network I created with virt-manager (0.9.1), 
which I have set as 172.16.0.0/12 (a little excessive, maybe? :P). Some 
don't even have an upstream connection, so can only be accessed from the 
host. This all works great on my LAN, but I am thinking of adding 
OpenVPN on the host so I and other users can more easily access these 
services from mobile devices.

     From what I read about OpenVPN's setup, it's required to bridge an 
interface. I haven't looked too much in to this as it seems a little 
over-my-head and I haven't had sufficient time to dedicate to the task 
as of yet. Would the bridged interface be a bridge of the VLAN 
interface? Additionally, if this is the case, I would need to define 
this bridge in addition to the VLAN in /etc/networking/interfaces (or 
else the bridge that OpenVPN is trying to attach to would be created 
before the interface that it's bridging), correct? Or am I just thinking 
about this entirely the wrong way? Any 
suggestions/explanations/this-is-an-IT-nightmare-have-you-considered-doing-it-this-way's 
are greatly appreciated.