On 02/03/11 19:07, Les Mikesell wrote:
On 3/2/2011 11:29 AM, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
So, I installed CentOS + KDE, chose the Virtualization package and used Virtual Machine Manager to setup another CentOS VM inside CentOS (I only have a CentOS ISO on this SAN, since we don't use Debian / Slackware / FC / Ubuntu / etc). The installation was probably about the same speed as it would be on raw hardware. But, using the interface is painfully slow. I opened up Firefox and browsed the web a bit. The mouse cursor lagged a bit and whenever I loaded a slow / large website, it seemed asif the whole VM lagged behind.
X without hardware acceleration is pretty ugly - you end up making the CPU do block moves even for simple things like screen scroling. Not sure how how the virtual interface works, but a better approach is either running X natively on your local hardware with the desktop/app remote (if you are on a low latency LAN) or freenx on the server and the NX client locally (works regardless of the connection speed).
What about making the VM running X server, accepting TCP connections, and access the VM from your host using a "local" X client display. A lot of bad things can be said about the X network protocol, but at least it works smoother than VNC. The X protocol requires bandwidth (compared to VNC), but working against a virtual network adapter doesn't necessarily kill the performance.
Other than that, SPICE is probably the future [1] on Linux. That should slowly begin to be useful in RHEL5, RHEL6 and Fedora 14, if I'm not much mistaken. Not sure how much is implemented in RHEL5/CentOS5 though. However, for SPICE to work, you need to use KVM. And you need the qemu-kvm part to initialise the SPICE display properly as well.
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4DZwYqnyJM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvfkj8V6ylM