SPICE for Proxmox VE (pvetest)

[spirit]

And anything we can use on Windows?

Don't known, maybe with powershell ?

I can do something in perl if you want, but you need to install perl on windows.

I think that somebody could create somekind of nice gui frontend for remote-viewer, showing all the vms using proxmox2 api, and just click to generate the ticket and connect.
Something in c++ and Qt, so it could be cross platform.

 

[AndyL]

Don't known, maybe with powershell ?

I can do something in perl if you want, but you need to install perl on windows.

I think that somebody could create somekind of nice gui frontend for remote-viewer, showing all the vms using proxmox2 api, and just click to generate the ticket and connect.
Something in c++ and Qt, so it could be cross platform.

I guess there's always sed,awk,curl and grep for Windows!

 

[dietmar]

And anything we can use on Windows?

Maybe we can use JavaScript?

 

[spirit]

Maybe we can use JavaScript?

Don't known if it's easy with old windows scripts (vbscript or jscript)

powershell have feature to do rest call, parse json,...

some example:

 $url = "http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=Yummy%20Pho&rpp=5&include_entities=true&result_type=mixed"
 [net.httpWebRequest] $myRequest = [net.webRequest]::create($url)
 $myRequest.Method = "GET"
 [net.httpWebResponse] $myResponse = $myRequest.getResponse()
 $myStreamReader = New-Object IO.StreamReader($myResponse.getResponseStream())
 $myJson = $myStreamReader.ReadToEnd()
 $myTweets = $myJson | ConvertFrom-Json
 $myResponse.Close()

 

[valshare]

spice works great over a wlan 2mbit line. But the windows client (under xp) crashed very often.

Is there a good osx client? I dont want to compile it myself.

 

[RobFantini]

Why not install Debian Wheezy on your desktop?

 

[mo_]

I can do something in perl if you want, but you need to install perl on windows.

you can create statically linked perl binaries with PAR. unless somebody feels like making a nice and tidy tool in C/C++, perl/python is probably the best shot so far

 

[mir]

e.g. the already packaged version for Debian are too old.

It is correct if you by packaged versions for Debian are referring to Wheezy and Jessie. For Sid the packaged version is 0.5.6-2 -> http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid&searchon=names&keywords=virt-viewer

 

[spirit]

It is correct if you by packaged versions for Debian are referring to Wheezy and Jessie. For Sid the packaged version is 0.5.6-2 -> http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid&searchon=names&keywords=virt-viewer

Yes, you need debian sid, or next coming ubuntu. (they are also some ppa with backported packages for ubuntu)
Or do like me, use Archlinux

The main problem is that spice is a new protocol, and it's moving too fast for debian dev cycle.
(example, a fix has just been commited in spice git last week (from a bug that we have detected), for a bug with live migration and spice).
And a new release of spice client occur around each 3 months.

 

[JimBeam]

Great news, thanks for the work and posting this!

 

[Milkwyrm]

Would it be possible to add a check box (or like) option that will allow virt-viewer to open full screen. It's just a case of inserting the "-f" switch into the launcher some how. would be usefull when opening desktop OS's that will be used for a length of time, just to skip the "F11" usage for an assigned end user.

 

[spirit]

Would it be possible to add a check box (or like) option that will allow virt-viewer to open full screen. It's just a case of inserting the "-f" switch into the launcher some how. would be usefull when opening desktop OS's that will be used for a length of time, just to skip the "F11" usage for an assigned end user.

Maybe can we add some spice preferences configuration (on proxmox account login?) like fullscreen start, number of monitors,.....

 

[mo_]

I was digging into the spice configuration. Normally this is done as qemu command line parameters, i.e. not very practical (in general and with pve).

I assumed that command line options to qemu like

-spice "(some parameter options here)"

would make a line in the VM.conf like

spice: (some parameter options here)

valid, but apparantly it doesnt. Is this file parsed by pve before being handed to qemu oder does this

vm 300 - unable to parse value of 'spice' - unknown setting 'spice'

error come directly from qemu?

Also in the spice manual it lists several qm monitor commands that are added for spice like spice.disable_ticketing (and others) which dont seem to be recognized...? (Although this might be related to the spice manual apparantly being horribly outdated)

 

[AndyL]

I was digging into the spice configuration. Normally this is done as qemu command line parameters, i.e. not very practical (in general and with pve).

I assumed that command line options to qemu like would make a line in the VM.conf like valid, but apparantly it doesnt. Is this file parsed by pve before being handed to qemu oder does this error come directly from qemu?

Also in the spice manual it lists several qm monitor commands that are added for spice like spice.disable_ticketing (and others) which dont seem to be recognized...? (Although this might be related to the spice manual apparantly being horribly outdated)

Well I'm using this line in my vm.conf file:

args: -vga qxl -spice port=7200,disable-ticketing -device virtio-serial,id=spice,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9 -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,name=vdagent -device virtserialport,chardev=vdagent,name=com.redhat.spice.0

and it works OK. Maybe you need args: -spice option in your conf file?

 

[mo_]

yep that works. However this only works if you DONT set the vga to spice within PVE (because pve overrides at least the -spice port= option), but instead use the command line options you supplied (without last device)

vm conf now contains:

args: -spice port=3129,password=test -device virtio-serial,id=spice,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9 -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,name=vdagent

However I was going to test multiple monitors, but:

kvm: -qxl: invalid option

which is confusing, shouldnt the calling binary be "qemu" instead of kvm (as -qxl is apparantly only valid as a qemu parameter)?

 

[AndyL]

yep that works. However this only works if you DONT set the vga to spice within PVE (because pve overrides at least the -spice port= option), but instead use the command line options you supplied (without last device)

vm conf now contains:

args: -spice port=3129,password=test -device virtio-serial,id=spice,bus=pci.0,addr=0x9 -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,name=vdagent

However I was going to test multiple monitors, but:

kvm: -qxl: invalid option

which is confusing, shouldnt the calling binary be "qemu" instead of kvm?

Yes, I found the same. You can either add the above to the conf file, set the display to anything but spice and use the spice viewer separately from the web interface, or you can remove that entry, set the display type to spice, and then you get the button on the web interface and you can then call the viewer from there. I have not tried multiple monitors, and you can't have two spice viewers connected to the same vm. Apparently there is a patch to allow that somewhere (as I discovered amongst numerous search sessions) but it seems to be experimental.

 

[mo_]

I wasnt shooting for multi-user usage with multiple screens, only wanted to test how a spice desktop "feels" and how multiple monitors handle and stuff. thanks for the insights tho

 

[wahmed]

Just a feedback............

I just installed an Ubuntu VM in Proxmox and logged in remotely using SPICE. Amazing! In one word.
With default display driver Ubuntu quite did not show smooth graphics. I tried default, Cirrus, VMWare Compatible. None of them had full color graphics inside the Ubuntu VM. But as soon as i selected SPICE and restarted Ubuntu, it had full color wallpaper instead of choppy black & white. Though the window movement inside Ubuntu through SPICE is not 100% smooth, its pretty acceptable if no video is going to be played on it.
Hopefully in coming months SPICE will get driver updates to make it as smooth as local? Or by nature it will be laggy?

 

[spirit]

Just a feedback............

I just installed an Ubuntu VM in Proxmox and logged in remotely using SPICE. Amazing! In one word.
With default display driver Ubuntu quite did not show smooth graphics. I tried default, Cirrus, VMWare Compatible. None of them had full color graphics inside the Ubuntu VM. But as soon as i selected SPICE and restarted Ubuntu, it had full color wallpaper instead of choppy black & white. Though the window movement inside Ubuntu through SPICE is not 100% smooth, its pretty acceptable if no video is going to be played on it.
Hopefully in coming months SPICE will get driver updates to make it as smooth as local? Or by nature it will be laggy?

Try to install in your vm "apt-get install spice-vdagent"

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/+package/spice-vdagent

"spice-vdagent is the spice agent for Linux, it is used in conjunction with
spice-compitable hypervisor, its feature includs:
\* Client mouse mode (no need to grab mouse by client, no mouse lag)
this is handled by the daemon by feeding mouse events into the kernel
via uinput. This will only work if the active X-session is running a
spice-vdagent process so that its resolution can be determined.
\* Automatic adjustment of the X-session resolution to the client resolution
\* Support of copy and paste (text and images) between the active X-session
and the client"


Also I'm not sure, but maybe Unity can have a performance impact. (or compositing in general). Do you try with another desktop to compare ? (xfce ?).
I known that a kms driver is available since kernel 3.10, and a mesa gallium driver should come soon, maybe it'll improve 3d performance and maybe compositing too ?
I don't have tested spice under linux yet, but on windows guest it's very fast. (video too).

 

[Raymond Burns]

So, as of right now, there is no way to boot into a Spice Windows VDI?
Is there a way to boot into a minimal Linux, autostart FireFox into VDI (password parsed)?