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Red Hat Open Sources SPICE Desktop Virtualization
laxl writes "Linux vendor Red Hat has open sourced the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE) virtual desktop protocol it acquired last year with Qumranet, which used SPICE for its own commercial desktop-virtualization product, called SolidIce. SPICE can be used to deploy virtual desktops from a server out to remote computers, such as desktop PCs and thin-client devices. It is similar to other rendering protocols used for remote desktop management such as Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol or Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture. SPICE supports rendering virtual instances of Windows XP and Windows 7, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to Red Hat, SPICE has advantages over other protocols in that it can dynamically customize desktop instances to fit specific operating environments. According to the article, most of the SPICE code is available under the GNU GPLv2, though parts are also licensed under LGPL- and BSD-styled licenses."
I wonder what the CHOAM will think about this?
You've been hitrolled
Seriously, SPICE stands for "Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis" and is a circuit simulator.
(If this was a couple years ago, I'd rant that UML stands for "Unified Modeling Language" (not User-Mode-Linux), or that X stands for "X Window System" (Not MacOS 10))
How many thinclients/hosts support the protocol to connect to it?
Isn't this different from RDP or ICA which are pretty much supported everywhere?
This really solves the last remaining hurdle for VDI thin client vertical engineering domain. Going to grab the git source tonight and test it out. Would be cool if an in browser NSAPI based plugin architecture was built on this. Run your thin clients on Google OS ( or something else), and then you can run all your legacy fat clients on your virtual servers and your uses just access them through a browser. I noticed that people have even worked on Javascript level RDP and No-machine client implementations. Obviously a bit slow for real world. Anyone know if KVM has dedicated VDI infrastructure servers yet ? Ged
Why would they take the name of an existing well-known software program?
Hoping for remote multi monitor support or I'm stuck with X terminals over ssh.
If not, go home. We don't need yet another "hero".
I currently use NXClient w/Neatx for that kind of remote access/management. It works well with both Linux and Windows backends.
I guess the difference is accessing various os's with a single protocol rather than using NX & RDP (like the NXclient does) + also possibly getting around some of the builtin limitations (available only on certain flavors of Windows, limited # accesses by default etc) of RDP.
Sounds interesting if the performance is decent.
I've seen a dozen blog posts in my reader about this, and I have been unable to far to figure out WTF that thing is supposed to do. Is it a remote display protocol? If so, how does it differ from RDP or NX?
are there any remote-desktoppy protocols/systems out there that do the Right Thing(TM) with a two-screen client machine? I'd like to move to Terminal Services (or NoMachine/SPICE/Whatever) for performance reasons, but giving up on my niche 2 screens (one for IDE, one for the software i'm developing/testing to run on) would be kinda a step back.
where they demoed this and other VM technologies. I think that RH has some really interesting VM Management stuff in the pipeline. The nice thing about SPICE is your browser is the client.
From the summary:
(Emphasis mine). Aha, so it's platform independent? And they support... Two! *badum-ching* operating systems: Windows and Linux. Compare that to VNC, of which it is hard to find an OS that doesn't support it.
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If its Open source then what is to stop you from taking said source and compiling it for your chosen platform?
Nowt methinks.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Pedantic, I know, but it's a pet peeve with me.
Although SPICE could be a legitimate acronym, neither UML nor X would be acronyms, they would be abbreviations.
Examples of acronyms; radar - RAdio Detecting And Ranging, sonar - SOunt NAvagation Ranging Examples of abbreviations; IBM, XML
Best regards.
It's for people who can't spell VNC.
This is yet another example of too many to name, of Red Hat being an all-around bunch of warm and fuzzy penguins, guys! And this is so typical of them: buy a proprietary product, and as soon as they decide to do something with it, they open source it first!
RedHat has NEVER deviated from their policy of releasing SRPMS for all their stuff. You can very literally roll your own distro simply by taking their SRPM and compiling them! And a number of groups have done just that: White Box Linux, CentOS and Scientific Linux.
Red Hat employs some of the most prolific contributors to the Linux Kernel and is a vital force in making Linux what it is today. Go Red Hat!
PS: No, I don't work for them, just a very happy customer!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If the plural of mouse is mice, shouldn't the plural of spouse be spice? /pinky
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
This is not a bad thing. For years, the only alternatives for virtual desktops were either proprietary (ICA comes to mind) or OS-dependent (Sun ALP, MSFT RDP, X, NX), leaving VNC as the only OS-independent option. VNC was (and still is) great, but let's face it, it was never intended to be used for real massive VDI-type deployments, even over the WAN. SPICE is supposed to have a good LAN performance, but still doesn't quite cut it for long latencies over the WAN. May be with this move, SPICE can be improved to also address those use cases.
For now, the most advanced thing I've seen is Teradici's PCoIP protocol that works really well in any environment, and they licensed it to VMware to be used in the new View 4 product line as a pure software implementation (as a disclaimer, I work for VMware, but PCoIP blew my mind way before we did anything with them).
In any case, 2010 is shaping to be the year of the virtual desktop, and competition is a good thing!
The primary Spice developer appears to be making a complete fool of himself on the qemu mailing list:
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-12/msg01182.html
I'd rather they fixed Windows guest support. I've tried it (in Ubuntu Karmic), and it's horrible if you want to run Windows in it (both XP and Win7). Very slow, timer lags behind, network and disk throughput are super slow even with virtio guest drivers. Linux runs fine as a guest on the same box.
I guess it's unfair to _demand_ anything if something cost you zero dollars (gifted horse thing and all), but VMWare ESX and HyperV Server also cost zero dollars these days, and they both run Windows just fine.
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Saw Brian Madden's video's recently with the results of their testing/comparison of ICA, RDP, SPICE see: http://media.brianmadden.com/qumranetvids/blogplayerstatic.asp It was very clear that SPICE far outperformed either ICA or RDP.