How to see guest OS screen?

[NickC]

Am I missing something obvious here?

Proxmox installed fine but Server just boots to a command prompt, no way that I can find to install and view a guest OS from there, perhaps it is not designed to allow viewing of a guest OS on itself?

I then connected remotely and created a guest OS but the monitor tab displays only a qemu prompt, no visual of the guest OS.

Have I missunderstood how Proxmox is designed to work?

Thanks,
Nick

 

[dietmar]

Proxmox installed fine but Server just boots to a command prompt, no way that I can find to install and view a guest OS from there, perhaps it is not designed to allow viewing of a guest OS on itself?

Management is done over http - so please use you web browser to connect to the server.

I then connected remotely and created a guest OS but the monitor tab displays only a qemu prompt, no visual of the guest OS.

On the Status tab, there is a link called "Open VNC console"

see also: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Category:Video_Tutorials

- Dietmar

 

[NickC]

Thanks Dietmar, Win2k3 & XP now running as guest OSs. Just a few small problems noticed though:
1). SCSI controller (Adaptec 29320A) not visible and therefore neither are the Tape drives.
2). Only one CD/DVD unit is visible, the second one is ignored.
3). Is there any way to install Proxmox without overwriting the whole disk? I want to have a couple of NTFS partitions left on the same disk.
4). With Win2003 using two CPUs the second CPU seems to idle around 10% rather than getting down to 0% as XP does with two CPUs.

Cheers,
Nick

 

[fortechitsolutions]

Hi Nick, just a few comments from my experience. Dietmar (or others) may correct me if I'm off base here on anything..

1) I don't think there is pass-through support for underlying devices to KVM virtual machines (ie, to give access to a KVM based windows virtual host to the SCSI controller in your ProxVE physical host.). I believe if you were running Linux in an OpenVZ container, there is a method to give priviledged access to an underlying device (ie, /dev/st scsi tape device); but that isn't what you are trying to do (wrong OS/platform for virtual host

2) no comment re: Multiple DVD drives (why would you want >1 anyhow? use ISO images and virtual drives ?)

3) ProxVE is a entire virtualization platform, not different conceptually from installing VMWare ESXi onto a host. Thus, you dedicate all resources of that hardware host to the virtualization platform. ie, you can't have other OS'es / partitions / etc on that machine - just the virtualization environment, within which you may create virtual machines (either OpenVZ or KVM based)

4) WRT SMP (>1 cpu) for Windows KVM based hosts: Not sure how you are finding it, but earlier versions of KVM had 'issues' with SMP stability for windows virtual hosts. i.e., it crashed a lot. I'm not sure if this still is the case or not. But just an FYI. If you find it is solid, that is good to hear . Not sure about the CPU idling issue specifically though, sorry.

Hope this info is of slight use / interest,

---Tim Chipman
Fortech I.T. Solutions
http://FortechITSolutions.ca

 

[NickC]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your comments & opinions.

1).
If I have understood you correctly there is no method to use the SCSI controller inside a Windows guest OS on Proxmox, this probably also explains why USB devices do not seem to work.

Unfortunately for us that rules it out of use in a production environment. Most of our Servers use a SCSI Tape streamer and also use USB to connect to their UPS.

2).
Re: Multiple CD/DVD drives - for security some servers have CD drives shared by the users as opposed to each workstation having a CD player, often more than one per server.

Rgds,
Nick

 

[tom]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your comments & opinions.

1).
If I have understood you correctly there is no method to use the SCSI controller inside a Windows guest OS on Proxmox, this probably also explains why USB devices do not seem to work. Unfortunately for us that rules it out of use in a production environment. Most of our Servers use a SCSI Tape streamer and also use USB to connect to their UPS.

direct mapped scsi controllers for using tape inside a windows KVM guest does not work currently (and as I know, the only working solution is from vmware, but only with adaptec controllers, also with XEN this does not work yet but I am not sure).

but I assume this will change soon, we already tried that and there is good progress. USB should work (not on the web), just query the forum for usb.

2).
Re: Multiple CD/DVD drives - for security some servers have CD drives shared by the users as opposed to each workstation having a CD player, often more than one per server.

Rgds,
Nick

I do not get this question clearly, what do you miss exactly?

 

[fortechitsolutions]

Hi Nick,

For UPS monitoring and power shutdown, I would recommend a 'proper' solution, ie, you don't want this done primarily at the level of virtual machines. Rather,

- use something like "NUT" (Network UPS Tools), an open-source package that installs quite easily on any linux; gives function similar to APC PowerChute .. ie .. UPS communicates (via serial / USB / snmp) with NUT server, and then NUT clients are notified by NUT server in case of looming power fail due to UPS running down on power. I believe you can run NUT client on any platform so if you really want your virtual machines to be notified - not just the virtualization layer - you can probably do that too. If only ProxVE was notified of shutdown, then it would initiate a clean shutdown once notified (which presumably would close the virtual machines in an orderly fashion first)


Regarding CD drives / network cd drive server: Wouldn't it make more sense to have the data from the CD's xferred to a file server, and then share the data to users in a 'typical fileserver manner' (virtual fileservers or other?) OR - if you prefer - there are a multitude of ISO-to-Virtual-CD-drive software solutions for lots of platforms, which allow you to,

- copy content of a CD disk to an ISO file that then lives on your server
- mount the ISO as 'virtual CD' and then share this back to users

they can pretend the things are still CD's ; they are still used as if they were CD's - but you don't need the fuss and muss of physical CDs or optical drives. Given current low costs for HDD capacity, I sort of thought optical changer servers were a thing of the past anyhow ...


Hope this is of slight help,


Tim

 

[NickC]

Hi Tom,

Lack of SCSI is unfortunately going to be a show stopper for us at the moment. I wonder if KVM within Fedora or Ubuntu supports SCSI?

I have followed the instrictions found here for using USB but the WinXP Guset OS doesn't seem to be able to recognise it.

The machine I am testing this on has one CD player and one DVD writer. Within th guest OS only the CD player is visible, there is no sign of the DVD writer.

Rgds,
Nick

 

[tom]

Hi Tom,

Lack of SCSI is unfortunately going to be a show stopper for us at the moment. I wonder if KVM within Fedora or Ubuntu supports SCSI?

not that i know. the only working is vmware (esx or server) with adaptec controller. but wait for the next releases.

see this thread.

Tape support:
In principle, its not recommended to run the tap drive on the virtualization host but for small installation it´s an option.

why don´t you install the backup software directly on the Proxmox VE host (e.g. Arkeia, sep, Bacula works on Debian Etch 64, the base of Proxmox VE)?

I have followed the instrictions found here for using USB but the WinXP Guset OS doesn't seem to be able to recognise it.

The machine I am testing this on has one CD player and one DVD writer. Within th guest OS only the CD player is visible, there is no sign of the DVD writer.

Rgds,
Nick

I never played extensively with usb, but should work. pls go to the KVM site and their support mailing list and maybe someone can point you to right direction.

 

[dietmar]

2). Only one CD/DVD unit is visible, the second one is ignored.

The web interface supports only one CD/DVD. But you can use as many you want using the command line tools, for example

qm set VMID -ide2 "/dev/scd0,media=cdrom"

see: man qm