This post is continued story from these posts ( 1, 2, 3 ).
Previously I tried SPICE protocol as alternative of Microsoft’s RDP, but at that time SPICE protocol was very early development so I could not satisfy my needs to use in daily use. But situation has changed. RHEL 6 has included SPICE protocol for VDI, so I’ve tried once again.
1. Environment
Physical Host: Scientific Linux 6
kernel: 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64
qemu-kvm-0.12.1.2-2.160.el6_1.2.x86_64
spice-server-0.8.0-1.el6.x86_64
Virtual Desktop: Fedora 15(i686)
kernel: 2.6.38.8-35.fc15.i686.PAE
xorg-x11-drv-qxl-0.0.21-3.fc15.i686
I’ve also used DNS, ddclient, and some router for this trial.(not written in this post)
2. Create Physical host
First, I’ve created normal kvm host. After the installation, I’ve also installed spice-server via yum.
3. Create Virtual Desktop
This procedure is just a little bit complex. First, I’ve created virtual machine using virt-manager and installed Fedora 15. But virt-manager only treat with VNC connection, so I’ve changed the configuration of virtual machine to work with SPICE.
4. Modify configuration to work with SPICE
After the installation, I’ve dumped configuration of virtual machine to XML file.
After definition, I cannot see console in virt-manager anymore. The reason is that virt-manager doesn’t support SPICE. So I issued virsh command to boot virtual machine.
After download, I unzipped both package and moved spicec.exe to libs directory for spicec.exe works with some libraries.
6. User Experience
I’ve tried. See movie.
7. Conclusion
SPICE protocol works good with mobile broadband and LAN connection, but you will feel some stress about some multimedia experience. SPICE connection via mobile broadband will consume about 800kbps bandwidth from my experience.