enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Bolesław Tokarski <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Thanks for the swift response. I think I failed to provide some useful
details, as "virtualization" is quite a wide term.

One of the projects inside Tieto is trying to find a VDI solution that
would suit their needs. As Tieto we are offering Citrix's
XenDesktop+XenApp suite, but that does not support Linux as a VDI
appliance, just Windows (I believe).

I believe the project is currently evaluating Ulteo, but as I recently
read David Burke's blogpost about it
(http://davidmburke.com/2012/12/04/review-of-ulteo-open-virtual-desktop/) I
thought I'd send them some other options as well.

Meanwhile, I noted RHEV, proxmox and oVirt.

On 01/16/2013 12:16 PM, Philipp Gassmann wrote:
> 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
Somewhere like 2 years ago I evaluated RHEV. As it was not long since
the acquisition of Qumranet by RedHat, it still required Windows for a
number of things, including backend servers (MS SQL anyone?).

There were spice packages for RedHat Desktop, but nothing for Ubuntu.
Even going the make && make install way did not work. In the meanwhile
there were discussions between RedHat and Debian devs about the version
of a library used in spice and that it was incompatible with the one
shipped to the world.

I know it's not that bad any more, I mean - there are standalone Spice
clients available.

I checked the spice-xpi package from Jason Brooks. There's no wonder it
does not work between distros/archs - it's a plugin, compiled on the
particular system. Praise to Jason Brooks for actually providing the
package in his PPA, because that actually does the actual job (packaging
spice-xpi for Ubuntu). The rest is procedures or politics.

I guess the best way to get this into Ubuntu's repository is to get it
included in Debian first.

On 01/16/2013 12:18 PM, Martinx - ジェームズ wrote:
>  I'm working with KVM and I'm about to test the Desktop Virtualization
> called SPICE.
>
>  After that, I'll see if it can be used within Openstack...
>
>  Also, my servers have IOMMU and 3 GPUs (Radeon 7970) and I'm planning
> to pass those GPUs to the Virtual Machine. But I think it doesn't work
> with SPICE... Maybe XCP (Open Source XenServer) with VDI can help me
> with this, but I don't know yet...
I'd say that's pretty complicated and I am not sure what you can achieve
with this - if you have hardware acceleration in the VM (by passing the
GPU to the VM with IOMMU which is cool) and you pass the video to a
remote client over LAN (a bottleneck). SPICE does it in a smart way by
providing a virtual GPU to the VM and using the remote client's hardware
acceleration capabilities, thus not hitting the LAN bottleneck.

I do not think that XCP will help you, either. The Citrix XenServer
commercial product that has all the possible video acceleration built-in
also offloads rendering to the remote client.

Sorry, but unless you run a monitor connected directly to the server's
GPU, you'll have no use of any VDI. Unless for mathematical computations
that recent GPUs can do, which is also cool.

Cheers,
Ballock