[ale] Virtual machine questions for public use machines

[Horkan Smith]

Alex, I don't have 'the' answer for you, but here's some thoughts:

Do you have a preferred VM host software (kvm/qemu, virtualbox, vmware?)

I *think* to give the guest full screen control, you need PCI passthrough, which looks to be hardware/ vm software dependent.  It's probably worth a look, but don't be surprised if it's not available for your HW or SW.

If PCI passthrough won't work for you, then the next 'least stuff running in linux' is probably something like directvnc (a framebuffer based vnc client) running on the linux machine, pointing to a VNC server exported by your VM software, or alternately by your guest OS.  There might be a framebuffer version of a spice client or an rdesktop client, not sure.  Your mileage may vary, my experience w/ the majority of direct-to-framebuffer apps is they're buggy and not worth it.

Last but not least, you could crank up an X-windows server with either no window manager, or a small window manager configured to offer no menus/escapes; then have your VM start in a full-screen window.  You can turn off the alt-f1, alt-f2, etc in your xorg.conf file to help prevent escapes.

With any of these options it's probably possible to point your linux console to a serial port, if the machines have one.

FWIW, I run kvm most of the time 'cause I like the fact I don't have to rebuild drivers when I switch kernels, and I like the command line configurability.  I've used both vmware and virtualbox in the past and been reasonably happy... for this application, I'd do a quick test to see if the windows guest ran significantly better on different VM software.

later!
   horkan


On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 11:25:47AM -0800, Alex Carver wrote:
> I'm going to try a virtual machine experiment in the next few weeks with
> some spare boxes at work but I'm having trouble figuring a couple things
> out.
> 
> First, is it possible to have a setup where the host OS (Linux) has no
> GUI (console at most) and the guest OS (Windows) is all GUI that can
> completely take over the screen to appear as if it was the host OS?
> 
> If that's the case, can this be configured to happen at boot (system
> boots, at end of boot guest is running on the whole screen)?
> 
> Is there a VM host that can accept a signal (by cron, ssh session, etc.)
> to kill a guest?  This is to kill the guest at night, delete the guest
> container file and then make a copy of an archived container to
> essentially start from scratch every day.
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-- 
Horkan Smith
678-777-3263 cell, ale at horkan.net