细柳营

There are many choices for desktop virtualization (sometimes called desktop cloud):

• ICA – Citrix XenDesktop supports it
• PCoIP – VMWare View supports it
• RDP – Microsoft supports it
• SPICE – Red Hat (RHEV) supports it
• … …

The last one, SPICE, really rocks, especially in multimedia and WAN! The user experience is really great.

SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) is an open standard. Red Hat got SPICE and KVM when it acquired Qumranet in 2008, and opened them. SPICE support was added to upstream Qemu in April 2010, that means, if your Qemu is released after April 2010, you can play with SPICE easily with the following steps.

This experiment uses Fedora 15 x86_64 as the host machine OS, SPICE server doesn’t support 32-bit system due to its reliance to 64-bit atomic operation, and uses Windows XP as the guest machine OS, because Windows still dominates the personal desktop area.

1. Create a VM and install Windows XP:

Prepare a virtual disk:

$ sudo qemu-img create -f raw winxp.img 10G

Install VM:

$ sudo virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
                    --name=richdesk --ram=1024 --vcpus=1 \
                    --os-type=windows --os-variant=winxp \
                    --hvm --virt-type kvm \
                    --cdrom=/path/to/winxp_install.iso \
                    --disk path=/path/to/winxp.img \
                    -w network=default \
                    --graphics spice,port=5901,listen=0.0.0.0 \
                    --video qxl --channel spicevmc \
                    --soundhw default \
                    --accelerate

Notes:

• The above command uses NAT for network, if you prefer bridge mode, change network option to --network bridge=br0. Of course, you need to configure a bridge device br0 firstly.
• The above command uses 5901 as SPICE server port, you can change it to any valid port. Please make sure the port is opened on the host machine if it has firewall enabled.

After installed the basic Windows XP, shutdown the VM.

2. Install SPICE guest packages for Windows

Download the latest Windows binaries packages from SPICE website:

$ wget http://spice-space.org/download/binaries/qxl-win-0.1010-20110308-d9eb3203bd.zip
$ wget http://spice-space.org/download/binaries/virtio-serial_20110725.zip
$ wget http://spice-space.org/download/binaries/vdagent-win32_20110801.zip

Copy qxl, virtio-serial, vdagent packages into the images:

$ sudo virt-copy-in -a winxp.img *.zip 'win:c:\'

Then start VM, and install the drivers qxl and virtio-serial.

Unzip vdagent package to any place, for example, C:\opt, and register it as a Windows service:

C:\opt\vdagent-win-x86> vdservice install

Reboot this Windows VM.

3. Connect to VM via SPICE protocol

There are several client tools which support SPICE protocol, for example, Vinagre, spicec, virt-manager, etc. My favourite is Vinagre. Also you can buy a thin client hardware whose firmware supports SPICE protocol.

By default the SPICE plugin of Vinagre is disabled, you can enable it through Edit -> Plugins. Then you can connect to host:5901.

Now you have gotten a Windows guest with SPICE support, then enjoy the great quanlity and smooth operation experience brought to you by SPICE! Is it all? Yes if you mean SPICE. But if you want to improve the performance of your virtual desktop more, recommend to use virtio drivers for hard disk and network card. I’m not going to cover virtio in this post.

Have fun ^o^