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
programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw