Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?
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@scottalanmiller I though spice was weak over the WAN. It was rich but was bandwidth hungry.
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@dafyre there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work cleanly over folder redirection (OSTs being one). Stuff like persona also kept login storms under control by doing just in time profile loading and stubbing everything else. Stuff like immedIo/UEM can even allow templates central control of app settings I'm profiles. At large scale changing things not in GPO (A niche setting in say Microsoft Lync or a custom app, or tying certain apps to a printer, or fixing default window sizes) this stuff is handy.
2012R2 moved towards VHds for profiles which improved some things (performance) but lost others (can't put them on a DFS share)
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I just found out that Webvirtmgr (what I use for managing my KVM server) can use the Spice protocol for a VM. It's actually not half bad. I can see a marked performance boost over VNC (and the WAN!)
It even runs better than X2Go in some respects.
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@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@scottalanmiller I though spice was weak over the WAN. It was rich but was bandwidth hungry.
never used it, in theory it was designed to be light or they would have just used VNC. But I've not tested it and its adoption is low.
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@dafyre VNC kinda sucked IMHO over the wan.
The other thing is VDI environments are complicated beasts and rich monitoring tools (everything from protocal level network into, to troubleshooting infrastructure issues) are something you need at the scale where VDI normally makes sense.
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@scottalanmiller IBM tried to push it and ultimately gave up.
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@John-Nicholson virtual bridges (the guys behind it) got bought by nimbox that went out of business.
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@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@scottalanmiller IBM tried to push it and ultimately gave up.
IBM actually gave up on something? They are like the kinds of dead horses.
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@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@dafyre VNC
kinda suckedstill sucks IMHO over the wan.FTFY, lol.
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@dafyre said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@dafyre VNC
kinda suckedstill sucks IMHO over the wan.FTFY, lol.
Even local.
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@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@John-Nicholson virtual bridges (the guys behind it) got bought by nimbox that went out of business.
It was Qumranet that made it, then Red Hat bought them.
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We need someone to get this working in a lab and see what it does.
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@StrongBad Then what? VDI is something I wouldn't run without robust support. When EVERY desktop in your environment crashes and burns you kinda need 24/7/365 support
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What about places that just want to run it as a backup or alternative for normal desktop computing? Or use it as a failover from the datacenter?
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At my last job we had some sales guys who used it, but they really used it 100% of the time so they didn't end up with some documents on one laptop, some on the VDI, some on another. I used VDI, but primarily as a jump host to pop from our data center, or if I was traveling with just my iPad, That's another thing, is you REALLY want client designed for iPads with custom gesture support etc. Citrix actually has a bluetooth mouse option even. They wanted to be able to use different devices to access their data and we were using some applications that did not have native mobile, or web apps.
Now the office would loose power, cooling, water etc, and the most effective thing for DR was we all had laptops and would just wander off and find internet somewhere else.
At my new job all of our applications are web based and or have mobile apps. We use a SSO broker system to access those applications (do a 2FA once, and then I can access anything in a single click. I can get into CRM, 365, to payroll or 401K as well as internal web applications. We have VDI but its really only something I use to get behind the firewall and access my labs, and as a company I would argue as an industry we are "moving past" VDI. VDI is not the ultimate form of elegant end user computing management, its a stop towards MAM,MDM, Identify Brokering, etc.
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@scottalanmiller said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@John-Nicholson said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@scottalanmiller I though spice was weak over the WAN. It was rich but was bandwidth hungry.
never used it, in theory it was designed to be light or they would have just used VNC. But I've not tested it and its adoption is low.
It's definitely faster than. Also has native audio support, compresses better, etc. I use it on all of my stuff.
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@scottalanmiller said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@travisdh1 said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
@scottalanmiller said in Has Anyone Played with KVM-VDI?:
And I've not used SPICE, anyone know how well it performs?
Isn't that what vulr uses for their console access?
I don't think so, I'm not aware of a web SPICE agent. but they might be. It's totally possible, but nearly everyone uses VNC for that. Would be interesting to see a reference to that being what they use, though.
spice-html5
Spice provides a pure HTML5 client option. To use this, you will need to have the spice-html5 and python-websockify packages installed. Then, start a Spice server as you normally would (see either the Xspice or QEMU sections, above).Install the Apache configuration file
sudo cp /usr/share/doc/spice-html5*/apache.conf.sample /etc/httpd/conf.d/spice.conf
sudo systemctl restart httpd
Start websockify, providing a new port, and the host and port where the Spice server is running.
websockify 5959 localhost:5900
Open a web browser, and navigate to http://<system-with-apache>/spice/
Enter the address of the system running websockify, and the port (e.g. 5959) you specified when you invoked websockify, and click 'Start'. You should now see your Spice session.From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Spice#spice-html5
Proxmox includes an HTML5 spice viewer.
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KVM-VDI is also capable to use SPICE HTML5 (derived form eyeOS SPICE HTML5 client, which supports protocol compression and is much faster, than native HTML5 client).
Though standalone SPICE client is better for thin clients - you can have a USB device redirection and also even faster graphics. This has some limitations, - standalone SPICE client is usable only inside hypervisor network, so it can't be used from any network location. This is when HTML5 client comes in handy.
This diagram shows basic KVM-VDI structure:
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@Seitan -- Does KVM VDI work with Windows as well as Linux for the VDI VMs?
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Yes it does. Since virtualization is based on qemu-kvm there is no limitation on what type of VM OS you will use.
SSO is tested and works with Windows up from Vista (Vista/7/8/10 etc. - I will not make support for XP and lower, since it's really outdated OSes) and all Linux distributions with GDM3 desktop manager.
