Can I add additional console options like Windows RDP and NoMachine

[megatonstl]

While it's nice to have a no-frills console (three of them even) available I'd really like to add some high performance remote technologies like Windows RDP, NoMachine and Vmware View. My goal is to avoid buying a VDI connection broker and just use the proxmox permission sets to create user views and AD for system logins.

I'm willing to dig into code as I'm learning javascript and powershell right now but I'd rather not re-invent the wheel if there's an easier way.

I'm aware that this will require some kind of proxy service for the differing connection options.. really Windows Remote desktop is good enough but it'd be cool to offer more.

Also, if you have a good free connection broker suggestion let me know... this is all for a proof of concept for VDI as a service.

Feel free to play devils advocate as well, some ideas need to be killed in the womb.

 

[megatonstl]

Also, I'm aware that spice is supposed to be good these days but I'm not getting the same performance as with the other ones I mentioned.

 

[LnxBil]

Everything boils down to what KVM/QEMU offers and it does not offer NX or RDP as output devices at the moment. If you want to add that, just go over to the project and try to work on it. All options that qemu provides can be seen in the manpage (Webextract).

The PVE Web-UI was not created for a VDI-Setup, it's just to slow for that. Best is to use SPICE for such setups and there exist (at least I saw a demo on ProxTalks 2017) software that does a Thin-Client with SPICE and PVE (authentication and redirection).

 

[dhardyuk]

Sorry for the moderately necro post.

My interpretation of OP's question is more a web GUI tweak to recognise that the underlying VM is running Windows and to display an rdp://ip.address or rdp://vm.guest.FQDN that can be clicked to launch an RDP session with RDP config and options being handled by the actual target VM - as opposed to making the hypervisor also be an RDP gateway. It could be coded into the VM Options tab and controlled with a binary switch to display the link or not.

Guacamole works very nicely, but incurs the overhead of another VM, or jumpbox. The other option is to install windows RDP proxy features, which can give a tidy RDP experience but works best when fronting a Windows domain.

I'm in the throws of migrating my home lab with ESXi to PROXMOX and am loving virtually all of the functionality and features. Currently I have one host nested inside ESXi and one hardware host and don't see anything yet that could persuade me to go back. I'll look at SPICE as well, but my gut tells me that Guacamole would be how I'd be doing this on my lab because it draws all of the remote technology types together so the one gateway covers RDP, SSH etc.

 

[LnxBil]

The console menu are settings that directly access the lxc console or the qemu virtual graphics card, without any guest feature requirements. This ALWAYS works and therefore it is integrated in PVE. It also works if the PVE host does not share any ip network with the guest and that is exactly the point why it does not make any sense to integrate other options there that are for everyone or rely on special circumstances and will result in more use cases or forum posts why the RDP button is not working.

That said, I do see the point in having some hook possibilities in which you could hook into like displaying some RDP/X2GO/xyz technology in there that will redirect to a specific protocol. This will most probably not going to be included, because you can skrew up a lot of things if you try to add js functionality to an already working product. So, this will not be supported due to the same reasons above.

However, a similar approach can also be done in the comments section in which you can write Markdown and create a button with that protocol-specific url as you like. Maybe that is better suited for what you're gone try to do?