[Spice-devel] Request For Comments: proposals for standarizing VDI protocols in IETF

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 02/09/2011 10:40 AM, liang.liang12 at zte.com.cn wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> As you know VDI is believed to be one of most promising technologies in cloud-computing ages, different companies or communities have different VDI protocol definitions, such as SPICE, RDP and ICA. Some are open, while some are proprietary protocols. Considering large deployment in future, inter-operatability will be key issue. So it's important to make VDI protocol open and standard.
> We submitted two drafts (problem statement and survey, pls. refer to below links for details) to IETF-80 (http://www.ietf.org/meeting/80/index.html) and will hold a bar BoF during IETF-80 in Prage. So we are sending this mail: 1) request for your comments or suggestions for the two draft documents; 2) if you're interested in the VDI standardization, please you attend the upcoming IETF meeting.
> http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-wang-clouds-vdi-problem-statement/
> http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ma-clouds-vdi-survey/
>

Interesting. I've read both documents and I've some comments wrt the vdi survey and
spice.

First of all I would choose a different term / name for the component of RDP / ICA
which run inside the guest to capture the graphics then agent. Many virtualization
solutions including non vdi solutions such as vmware workstation (an example where
the client viewing the vm and the host are one and the same machine), have a small
agent process inside the guest os which allows things like copy paste between the
guest os and the client os, and controlling attaching local drives to the virtual
machine from within the guest. And virtualization related agents are also typically
used in server virtualization scenarios, so I think agent is a bad name for the
graphics capturing part of RDP / ICA, as this can easily be confused with the more
light weight agents common in most virtualization solutions.

Spice also has such a light weight agent, which is used amongst other things for
copy and paste. You mention copy and paste as a future spice feature, but that has
been present in spice since the 0.6.3 release.

Offscreen surfaces are supported since the 0.6.0 release (for 2d) and
multi head has been supported even longer. Currently multihead support is limited
to windows as guest os (but works with any client).

Also usb-sharing is currently supported already in the official RHEV versions,
through a proprietary component. An open source replacement for this is coming
along nicely.

Last you also list vmware as using software inside the guest to capture graphics
output. I'm not familiar with vmware's vdi offering. But for vmware workstation
this is not true, in their workstation edition vmware uses a special vmware virtual
svga card for this.

Regards,

Hans