Spice instead of VNC for VMs

[Magicmissle]

I just grabbed a license so I have been playing with UNRAID for the first time. I'm a little late to the show but my Citrix/VMware stuff has been doing the job until recently. So far I love UNRAID and could see it as an ideal replacement for home and maybe small production for customers. My only suggestion would be that having virtio and the libraries from red hat, how hard would it be to implement spice as a visual display option for virtual machines? I believe spice also has capability for gpu encoding/decoding offload support. Thanks!!!

[gshlomi]

Sound interesting...

+1 

[gdeyoung]

+1 also, looking for this.

[greg_gorrell]

Anyone ever take this request seriously?

[matthope]

+1

[Magicmissle]

bumping

[Xaero]

I just purchased an unraid pro license, and I'm just a tad disappointed with the virtualization side of things. I love everything else, but I'm tempted to install Xen Server and then dump unraid inside that.
There's an official SPICE HTML5 client, and a full generation of QEMU ahead of this now.
NoVNC is "okay"
VNC as a technology is "Okay"
But for VMs I think SPICE, especially inside a web browser, is going to be far superior. Perhaps offer both options, but I cannot see the logical argument for being an entire generation behind on QEMU versions and using a dated technology like VNC for VMs.
NoVNC's scaling doesn't seem to play nice with the QXL video driver so the fullscreen toggle and the "remote resize" options are completely useless.

That said, I really think unraid should consider moving auxiliary components to a managed package system. Then we could update things like QEMU, the kernel, etc without waiting for unraid to bundle a new system.  Hopefully I don't end up regretting the purchase and having to migrate to a different technology in the end....

[jonp]

Spice is something we have played with in the past and had mixed results, but to be honest, we didn't have enough time to experiment thoroughly.  It is something we could consider for future inclusion, but it's just not a priority right now compared to other development efforts.

 

As far as a package system goes, we're not going in that direction.  There have been plenty of discussions around that in the past and it's just not in the cards.