Drag&Drop and Copy-Paste to VM console?

[PepeOnaChair]

Hello,
I was reading roadmap of PVE 4.0 and haven`t found the information if Drag&Drop and Copy-Paste to console of VMs is now possible. Now I`m using version 3.3-2, where D&D and C-P is not possible. Or at least I don`t know how to enable it.
Do you know if these features are planned to be implemented? To be able to copy files to and from VMs and C-P at least plain text would be a joy.
Pepe

 

[LnxBil]

Hi Pepe.

Short answer: This cannot be implemented generally.

Long answer:

It depends on the guest system. In other virtual environments, there are guest drivers which provide this functionality, yet not everywhere, e.g. VirtualBox only supports it with their native GUI (program on your computer), not RDP-based (which can be used with a web frontend like proxmox provides). Proxmox uses a similar approach, yet not RDP but VNC (actually QEMU provides this interface) and the VNC server show the output of a simulated graphic card. A graphic card does not know how to to copy&paste, therefore it cannot work with the current implementation. I may be wrong but IMHO no virtual environment is capable of this in general, only with support from the guest itself and some techniques to transfer keyboard and mouse input.

Yet, there is hope. Using SPICE it is possible to do this, but there exist no web client for this yet. SPICE has also other great features, yet it is not supported on each guest platform and is still in beta and it will not work on boot, in PXE or in plain kernel text mode. SPICE is an open standard and hopefully other vendors are picking it up so that there exist one interface to rule them all.

Advaned answer: Another possible solution could be to inject the pasted text directly via the QEMU monitor into the guest with the sendkey command, I personally find this a little bit slow, yet it could work.

Best,
Andreas

 

[PepeOnaChair]

Thank you for the answer. Recently I used vmware, where there was possible to install addons into a guest VM. I had mostly this idea in mind, but now I understand. Anyway you are doing great job. If it would be possible for our company (which I`ll check) I`d like to send you some money, because Proxmox is helping us a lot...