[colug-432] KVM management

[Steve Roggenkamp]

I've been using KVM for my personal VMs for over three years and have
been generally pleased with it.  I have configured my system to have a
base system responsible for hosting the VMs, then several VMs to
perform different tasks.  For instance, I have one VM for browsing the
general web, one for connecting to my financial institutions, one for
VPN connections to my work, etc.  The base system has exportable file
systems that VMs can mount via NFS.

My first system I configured like this was based (and still is) on
Debian 5.  I purchased a new laptop this Spring, an HP Pavilion dv6
having an AMD A6 with 8 GB RAM and use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for it.  My
primary reason for using Ubuntu rather than Centos is that it uses a
much newer kernel.

Thnigs work pretty well with my setup.  I use Spice rather than VNC as
it seems faster, and I could never get audio to work with VNC.  There
seems to be a significant difference in video performance between
native and virtual systems, but I'm still looking into using the
network ability of X Windows to mitigate to some extent.  What I mean
by this is I use ssh invoked from the base so that it's displayed on
the native display rather than on the Spiced console.  So, to run
firefox on a VM, I use the following command on my base system:

    ssh -X webuser at 192.168.122.125  firefox

The other thing that seems to help is to use a display size that maps
1:1 to the native canvas to eliminate scaling.  I'm still
experimenting.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Steve

On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Neal Dias <roman at ensecure.org> wrote:
> May want to look into oVirt.
>
> Actively developed; is, or was, an active upstream project for Red
> Hat's Enterprise Virtualization, which means they have a vested
> interest in seeing the project continue and mature.
>
> Regarding VNC, SPICE is an alternative you may want to explore.
>
> http://spice-space.org
>
> Disclaimer; I don't run these myself, nor really looked at them after
> I left RHT.
>
> -nd
>
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Greg Sidelinger <gate at ilive4code.net> wrote:
>> I'm finally replacing my home server which is an old P4 and this means
>> I get to rethink how I have things setup.  On my laptop I spin up
>> virtual machines to play with new things all the time.  I would like
>> to move a lot of these guests to the new home server now that it
>> supports virtual cpu extensions but have not decided how to configure
>> things.  I was thinking about using vmware's "free" esx stuff but
>> since it's management interface is a window's only program that is
>> out.  So I started playing with KVM over the weekend and I can't say
>> I'm in love but I bet most of it's a learning curve as I've been using
>> VMWare products for over 10 years on the desktop and server.
>>
>> Does anyone have any recommendations for a KVM management suit that
>> allows me to still use the libvirt command line tools if needed.  I'm
>> looking for something that is either web centric or provides native
>> clients for  Linux and OSX.  I've looked at
>> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools but would like a few
>> suggestions of which ones are "good".  So far I like cloudstack but
>> have yet to try and set it up.
>>
>> And is VNC really the preferred way to view a GUI from a KVM guest?
>> I've never really cared for VNC because it always seems "slow" to me
>> so I was hoping to see something that worked a bit better in the KVM
>> world to access my guests which require a GUI.
>>
>> ------------------------------------------
>> Sent from mobile device.... Please ingore my many typos.
>>
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