enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Philipp Gassmann <phiphi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Am 16.01.2013 09:37, schrieb Bolesław Tokarski:
> Hello,
>
> I believe at some point in the past I saw a post mentioning an 
> alternative desktop virtualization solution posted to this mailing list. 
> It was not the most common Vmware/Citrix thing. Now I cannot find it.
>
> What virtualization tools do you use or have evaluated and can provide 
> feedback about?
>
> Best regards,
> Ballock
>
Hi Ballock

There are different Open Source virtualisation technologies. There's
KVM, Xen and Virtualbox.
KVM is state of the art, included in the Linux Kernel and very robust.
Xen is the other big OS Virtualisation technology, but it's no longer
state of the art. Eventhough Oracle/Citrix which build on Xen claim
otherwise-
Virtualbox is another technology developed by Sun and aquired by Oracle.

For KVM there are many manager tools and frontends. Virt-Manager is the
GUI tool that can be used for most of the tasks. Red Hat Enterprise
Virtualisation (RHEV) or oVirt are Enterprise class Virtualisation tools
like Vmware/Citrix using KVM.

For personal use Virtualbox is great as it has a easy interface and
support for graphics acceleration.

For Desktop Virtualisation with Thin clients or remote access there are
different protocols. More or less performant and more or less open source.

RHEV/oVirt uses SPICE http://www.spice-space.org/ which is specifically
designed for VDI. It is great in performance and allows passing of local
hardware / Sound etc.


Sidenote:
For accessing the Video Console of RHEV/oVirt, a Firefox extension is
needed. Unfortuately that package is not provided by official ubuntu
Repos. Even though Canonical is "strategic partner" of the oVirt
project, nobody seems to care.

A while ago I opened a Bug where I asked and pushed for a package of spice-xpi for Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/943510

Jason Brooks from Red Hat then created a package for Ubuntu and put it in his PPA, which works fine.
https://launchpad.net/~jasonbrooks/+archive/ppa

If anyone knows somebody who can help fixing that, I would very
appreciate that.

Best regards,
Philipp