[fedora-virt] General Virtualization Questions

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 07:18:42AM -0400, Jorge Fábregas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to KVM (just got a CPU with VT-x support) so now I can finally
> use QEMU/KVM properly.  I'm using Fedora 14.  Yes I know it's not
> supported; I promise I won't ask for issues I'll encounter until I
> upgrade to F18 when it comes out :)  (and then I'll face GNOME 3...)
> 
> Right now I've been playing with a Windows XP VM and so far so good; I
> love the performance.  Since my previous experience was with VMware
> Workstation/Player & VirtualBox I've got some general questions
> regarding virtualization (from the point of view of a desktop user):
> 
> 1) Is there an equivalent of "VMware Tools"/"Guest Additions"? I noticed
> there's an ISO with the paravirtualized drivers (VirtIO) but I'm
> wondering: If you're not using any of those paravirtualized drivers: is
> there anything to be installed on the guest in order to integrate it
> more with the host?

To rephrase the question as "is there anything like the smooth
integration that VMware Tools / VirtualBox gives you?" then the answer
is no.  Virtio is aimed at performance; in general most of the tools
are aimed at using and deploying virtual machines as servers, where
fancy UI integration across virtual desktops isn't important; but
maximum performance, ease of massive deployment, scripting, cloud
etc. are important.

> 2) What's the standard method you guys use to transfer files between the
> guest & the host?  Is drag & drop supported with Spice these days?  Do
> you recreate the "Shared Folder" thing (like VirtualBox) using Samba on
> the host? or do you loop mount the VM disk image when the guest is down?

Similar to the previous answer, but you can do this using Dropbox,
Samba, NFS, etc.  Just treat VMs the same as networked machines and
you won't go far wrong.

> 3) Is sound working "out of the box" these days (F17 & F18 beta?).  I
> got it working following a website (I had to put SElinux in permissive
> mode, had to change the uid of the qemu process to be that of my user
> and enabled vnc_allow_host_audio in qemu.conf).

Sound should just work AFAIK.

> 4) Is SPICE the default remote-display system used these days (F17 and
> forward)?  Since I'll be using QEMU/KVM on my desktop system (I'll run
> all my VMs locally), is there a noticeable difference between VNC and
> SPICE when you run these VMs locally?

There's not a big difference in the local desktop case.  The big
differences begin when accessing the desktop remotely and playing
videos.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows
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