Spice on 13.04

[pnunn]

Hi Guys,

I'd really like to try spice on my VM's running on a 13.04 KVM host, but for some reason I can't get it working.

I've installed the spice packages, but when I try and run the daemon, it says its starting, but simply doesn't (according to status) and no logging is generated anywhere that I can find.

Has anyone managed to get this working?

Ta

Peter.

[dmeyer]

Hi Guys,

I'd really like to try spice on my VM's running on a 13.04 KVM host, but for some reason I can't get it working.

I've installed the spice packages, but when I try and run the daemon, it says its starting, but simply doesn't (according to status) and no logging is generated anywhere that I can find.

Has anyone managed to get this working?

Ta

Peter.

I recently tried KVM - it was a decent experience. Just remember you can't use KVM and VirtualBox at the same time. KVM is great for virtualizing servers but for desktop virtualization, VirtualBox is much better. Anyways, remember we are working with kernel modules, so once everything is installed, you need to reboot. Also, how are you creating and/or managing virtual machines?

[pnunn]

Hi Dmeyer,

Thanks for the input, I do exactly as you suggest, VB on the desktop and KVM on my servers (of which I have several succesfully running linux and M$ loads). I use virt-manager to manage them.

My interest in spice (rather than the standard vnc) console is to try and get clipboard transfers working on KVM the way they do on VB, but I'm not having much joy getting Spice working.

Peter.

[dmeyer]

Ok, so you need qemu-kvm-spice for spice. Then you must change the graphics adapter for the VM to QXL. Apply it, and you should be able to change from VNC to spice. This is most easily done with the GUI.

What do you mean by clipboard transfers? You mean copying in host and pasting in guest? As far as I know KVM still doesn't support that. Also, if you are using KVM for servers, why would you have a GUI running? You should be using something like ssh. Sorry if it seems like I'm bashing you a bit but I'm not exactly sure what setup you are aiming for.

[pnunn]

Must be something different going on here. I don't see any qemu-kvm-spice package in the repo's. I do have spice-vdagent though which is referenced in some other tuts. I assume this should be running on the host?

The "servers" I'm running gui-less, but there are some dev box's that have gui that is where I would like the cut and paste.

Don't mind questions being asked best way to sort out what's going on.

[dmeyer]

Must be something different going on here. I don't see any qemu-kvm-spice package in the repo's. I do have spice-vdagent though which is referenced in some other tuts. I assume this should be running on the host?

The "servers" I'm running gui-less, but there are some dev box's that have gui that is where I would like the cut and paste.

Don't mind questions being asked best way to sort out what's going on.

Sorry, that package name might be wrong. Last time I used kvm with spice on (k)ubuntu was 12.04. Anyways, I have an exam tomorrow so I don't think I'm going to have the time right now to walk you through but I'll point you at some things that might help. For general KVM stuff try http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...ide/index.html

Now the distro, I found that makes virtualization easiest is actually, openSUSE 12.3. The yast module for virtualization auto installs and configures the system appropriately. Even Fedora is to me, a better virtualization platform. Both those distros also have better documentation.

Ideally, we can get you set-up with a kubuntu base but I don't think KVM is what would fufill your needs best. I really do think you should just stick to VirtualBox for dev work and then migrate to KVM for your server stuff.

After Monday, when I've written my last exam then I can really help you. Hopefully somebody else can come along and help you out.

[SteveRiley]

I think a lot of folks would appreciate a KVM-based desktop virtualization mechanism. Right now, I use VMware Player because of its Unity feature -- integrating guest applications directly into the host's task manager and desktop is quite nice. But VMware Player is rather brittle, and often breaks when kernels or other libs get updated. The update to libc6 in Raring has broken Player's vmware-gksu, causing installations to fail. I found a workaround that I'll write up later. To be fair, Dibl independently found the same solution.

VirtualBox is Oracle -- 'nuff said. Given their track record of turning everything they touch into stone, I worry about VirtualBox's future. However, it is the most feature-rich desktop virtualization tool available now. I'd use it, despite my repulsion against Oracle, if it had the same Unity feature in VMware Player.

But both these products ignore KVM -- a virtualization layer built right into the kernel we all run. QEMU and libvirt, as guest managers, just don't compete with VMware and VirtualBox at all. Spice appears to be an attempt to rectify that, but it's a pain to get running. I gave up after a couple days of fruitless struggle.

[dmeyer]

I think a lot of folks would appreciate a KVM-based desktop virtualization mechanism. Right now, I use VMware Player because of its Unity feature -- integrating guest applications directly into the host's task manager and desktop is quite nice. But VMware Player is rather brittle, and often breaks when kernels or other libs get updated. The update to lib6c in Raring has broken Player's vmware-gksu, causing installations to fail. I found a workaround that I'll write up later. To be fair, Dibl independently found the same solution.

VirtualBox is Oracle -- 'nuff said. Given their track record of turning everything they touch into stone, I worry about VirtualBox's future. However, it is the most feature-rich desktop virtualization tool available now. I'd use it, despite my repulsion against Oracle, if it had the same Unity feature in VMware Player.

But both these products ignore KVM -- a virtualization layer built right into the kernel we all run. QEMU and libvirt, as guest managers, just don't compete with VMware and VirtualBox at all. Spice appears to be an attempt to rectify that, but it's a pain to get running. I gave up after a couple days of fruitless struggle.

VirtualBox has seamless mode which might be like Unity? It also allows sharing clipboard etc between guest and host.

Next week some time, I'm going to write up a tutorial for KVM on Kubuntu with step by step instructions and screen shots. The only thing is, I'll have to try explain how KVM has a terrible desktop performance i.e. moving windows lags etc whereas other offerings don't. On the flipside, when running things headless, KVM comes within 10% of native performance in terms of disk IO, cpu usage and other operations which is quite literally unmatched by its competitors.

[SteveRiley]

VirtualBox's seamless mode creates a guest window that's the same size as the host's maximum resolution and then pushes that window behind the host's desktop, so it isn't quite the same thing. It also doesn't put guest applications on the host's task switcher.

[dmeyer]

VirtualBox's seamless mode creates a guest window that's the same size as the host's maximum resolution and then pushes that window behind the host's desktop, so it isn't quite the same thing. It also doesn't put guest applications on the host's task switcher.

Oh wow. This Unity thing sounds actually quite amazing. I know that VirtualBox plans to extend the Seamless mode to do some of the things you mentioned but under Oracle's stewardship I've seen the rate of development on VBox slow down a lot.

[SteveRiley]

This Unity thing sounds actually quite amazing.

Take a look. Notice the icons for Calculator and Notepad in KDE's task manager on the right.

[pnunn]

Back on this spice track. I've installed a new vm, and got as far as it reporting that it can't find the spice gtk client (which is installed on both the host and on the machine I'm running virt-manager on). Very annoying. Looking on Google it seems this is an issue with all of Ubuntu. This is a real pain as it seems that Spice would be really good for what I'm trying to do.