Controlling virtual machines with VNC and Spice

Well Seasoned

Conclusions

The graphics system plays a subordinate role in server use scenarios; in fact, the GUI on a server system is primarily used for the installation. The situation is totally different when KVM is used for desktop virtualization, where the new Spice protocol has obvious benefits compared with VNC. Unfortunately, Spice does not work out of the box with all distributions. The use of Spice is well supported on Fedora and RHEL. But both VNC and Spice reach their limits if you need 3D graphics. In contrast to VMware or VirtualBox, KVM does not currently give users an option of outsourcing 3D functions to the virtual machine.

The Author

Michael Kofler http://kofler.info is a freelance computer book author and trainer. He recently published Linux 2013 with Addison-Wesley.

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