Hi, I've been trying to figure this out. I'm new to KVM and decided to venture off into it for a home server I'm working on. I decided to install KVM on my debian machine, but once I create the host with the ISO, I can't figure out is there a way to install a .iso file without a graphical user interface?

It seems the only way I can do it on a headless system is create a template on a system with a graphical UI and install it on the host via template?

Is that correct or is their something I'm missing?

To my knowledge, there is nothing that the GUI can do that cannot be done from the command line. The GUI tools, in fact, are running the command-line under the hood and may be more limiting than the command-line tools. The advantage of the GUI is that it DOES limit some things to fill in reasonable values and prevent some human error.

Google for what you want to do and the name of the tools (if known) that you want to use and see what turns up. I would venture to guess that the results will include some command-line instructions. (Once you know some of the commands, the man pages may also help.)

That is what I thought, but the only thing I can seem to find on google is doing it remotely by spawning a VNC server on the X11 system. I know when I played with OpenVZ in the passed, I did create the templates on my desktop and forwarded them to the server. I'm thinking that might be the most efficient way. Either way this is something I want to deploy in production, and I have to learn the ins and outs before doing so.

But as of right now I have XFCE4 installed on the system which I run the install with it to create the guest for an .iso file, and kill off the x11 afterwords. I know if I create a template I can manage to do it from the CLI. I mainly use virsh to managed the install aftwords.

You can use the graphical virt-manager to manage libvirt instances both local or remote (via automatic ssh tunneling). It has a nice and working GUI with graphical guest console and pretty much everything you need from a modern virtual machine management GUI.
The graphical virt-manager instance has to run only on the controller machine, the server has to run libvirt with no graphical anything needed.

It does impose certain limitations (it has excessive input checking and certain features from libvirt's xmls not recognized), but it is most certainly usable.

And if you use it make sure you use certificate-based connections for the user you connect via ssh because otherwise you will have like 8-10 password prompts when you connect to a virtual machine - this is because various subsystems have their own ssh-based tunnels set up separately.

BTW there is Proxmox which is a full open source virtualization solution deployed in a single server that can be "clusterized" if needed (it is based on Debian and uses KVM for VMs and LXC for containers). It has a very nice web control interface and a simple to use command line.