[Spice-devel] [Users] multiple concurrent spice consoles (was Ovirt + Spice + VDI)

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 20:16 +0430, Mohsen Saeedi wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> John A. Sullivan III <jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com> wrote on Thu, 13
> Sep 2012 08:38:11 -0400:
> > On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 08:06 -0400, Alon Levy wrote:
> > > > Hi Mohsen,
> > > > 
> > > > multiple sessions to the single VM are not on the roadmap. There is
> > > > experimental multi-client support but it is to make more users see
> > > > the
> > > > same session.
> > > Moshen,
> > > 
> > >  I misunderstood. In this case, I guess I don't actually see how we could fix your problem without circumventing any mechanism that windows has to count license users.
> > > 
> > >  Please ignore my lengthy email, it won't help you at all.
> > > 
> > > Alon
> You can use some recipe for get ridding windows XP RDP limitation:
> http://www.petri.co.il/multiple-remote-desktop-sessions-on-windows-xp-sp3.htm
> 
I think the problems are more legal than technical.  From the above
link:
"However, be warned. Before you begin, I need to warn you that patching
the file and allowing more than one concurrent Remote Desktop session
will violate a few lines in the Windows XP EULA. Proceed with caution
and at your own risk."
> > <snip>
> > We are actually quite interested in something like this.  In effect, it
> > is RDS but replaces the RDP protocol with SPICE for the advantages SPICE
> > brings.
> > 
> > We have also been toying with the idea of using KVM/KSM to move to a
> > single server per user.  This would provide much greater isolation and
> > non-repudiation but we are concerned about the overhead of KVM on the
> > KVM host and deduplication on the SAN.  Thanks - John
> I think so, spice has experimental feature for multiple client to
> single windows XP now. is it true??
> and what is the details for idea of using KVM/KSM to move to a single
> server per user? I didn't understand it very well.
> Thanks
This is something we are able to do splendidly well with VServer and
X2Go (an NX implementation).  With the VServer hashification feature, I
can have 400 VMs on a host and only take one VM's worth of space for
system files.  Moreover, all instances in memory only take the space of
one instance. Thus, we get deduplication and KSM almost for free.
Because the additional overhead is so minuscule (minimal memory and disk
and almost no virtualization overhead since it is a container technology
instead of a hypervisor), and because there are no licensing issues for
our Linux desktops, it makes sense to give each user a dedicated VM.
Not only does that give us excellent isolation from errant processes but
it also means (because of the details of our implementation) that each
user has a consistent IP address allowing us to correlate network events
with specific users.

In some Windows licensing models, there is no cost differential between
individual workstations and individual VMs.  In that model, we are
investigating the same scenario, viz., a single VM per user.  However,
since we cannot use VServer for Windows guests, we either need to look
at Virtuozzo or produce the same results with KVM/KSM/dedupe.  We
suspect that is much more resource intensive than it is with VServer.

Whatever model we choose, we then need a transport protocol and, as
SPICE is refined especially in its handling of WAN video, we are quite
interested in using it rather than RDP for transport.  I hope that
clarifies it.  Thanks - John