On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Theo Band theo.band@greenpeak.com wrote:
On 08/28/2012 04:23 PM, James B. Byrne wrote:
I am nearing the end of a project that moved our disparate services and hosts onto kvm virtualized servers. What I am now contemplating is setting up my desktop as a virtual host and using one of the guests as my primary workstation.
However, I am not sure how this would work in practice. I am accustomed to working with virtual instances via ssh (a terminal window) and with my desktop system in a Gnome window manager. Is there a reference somewhere that outlines the mechanics of logging into a virtual guest's graphical desktop directly from the physical console of the kvm host system?
I'm not sure what your benefit is to not use your host but a VM running on it.
One nice thing is that when you update/change/switch distros, etc., you can run old/new in parallel. Another is that you can easily move the VM elsewhere if resources are available and it is mostly transparent to your use as a desktop.
You could consider to use XDMP. You still need a (local) X server (gdm), but then choose remote logon usign XDMCP. On the virtual machine use gdmsetup to allow remote access or use this link:
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Installation_Guide/s2-trouble-remotex....
Freenx/NX does all the same things as native remote X, but with better remote performance and the ability to disconnect and reconnect (even from a different display) with everything still running. There is probably some memory overhead for the proxy/cache buffers, though.