I am new to this list and hope it's the right place to address my issue. I also do not have much insight in libvirt/qemu yet

host OS is ubuntu-server 1404. What I am trying to achieve is installing an ubunt1604 server on to an existing (qemu-img create) qcow2 image file with the following command ...

   sudo virt-install --name myVM --ram 512 \
   --disk path=/path/to/image.qcow2 \
   --location /path/to/ubuntu-16.04.1-server-amd64.iso

... and then access the machine (through my hosts terminal).

the command above results into 

Starting install... Retrieving file version.info...
 | 116 B 00:00 ... Retrieving file linux...
 | 13 MB 00:00 ... Retrieving file initrd.gz...
 | 72 MB 00:00 ... Creating domain...
 | 0 B 00:01 Connected to domain myVM Escape character is ^]

after that, nothing.Not having   ^   on my keyboard I don't get to escape from this

When I check on another console window (virsh list --all) in my host I see that the domain myVM is marked as 'running.

naturally There is not way to access it via ssh yet and I'd expect to be a given that is should be possible to acces a VM's command line from my host directly

   virsh connect qemu:///system myVM   is something I came up with but that only returns an error

   "error: unexpected data 'myVM'"

Furthermore I am unable to stop the machine (virsh shutdown myVM)  either, it just keeps running until killing it