[ale] Virtual machine questions for public use machines

[Alex Carver]

On 2015-01-25 18:04, Horkan Smith wrote:
> 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?)

No, no preferred software, just something that lets me run a GUI guest
on a non-GUI host and also lets me kill the guest from the outside.
After that anything is fine.

> 
> 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.

I'll have to test this then, no problem.  The machines are old Dells
with dual Xeons and a PCI graphics card though I'm not sure what.
They're not going to have all the extra virtualization support that new
processors do but it only has to support a very basic host and a fairly
slim guest.

> 
> 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.

I'll keep all of this in mind during testing.  It sounds like PCI
passthrough is going to be my first stop since full screen control is
exactly what I'd like to have, the illusion that the guest is the only
OS on the system.