Features/SpiceInVirtManager

= Spice support for virt-manager =

Summary
Ability to create, configure and display Spice-enabled VM from virt-manager.

Owner

 * Name: Marc-André Lureau


 * Email: marcandre.lureau at gmail.com, marcandre.lureau at redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 15
 * Last updated: 28/03/2011
 * Percentage of completion: 100% - waiting for virt-manager 0.8.7 release (still in testing, fixes in upstream - 7/04/2011)

Detailed Description
virt-manager can currently manage QEMU VMs with VNC. It provides the ability to connect and display VNC (with various functionalities such as credentials, screenshot, send special keys, ssh tuneling, display scaling)

This feature is about supporting Spice at the same level, so that fedora users can benefits Spice goodness easily when creating VM (Features/Spice) and avoiding command lines.

Benefit to Fedora
Fedora will provide a better user experience to configure and use Spice.

Scope

 * libvirt, and python-virtinst needs to support the qemu -spice options
 * spice-gtk needs to be released with spice
 * virt-manager needs to be updated to support spice-gtk
 * virtio serial driver needs to be merged in qemu, and the rest of the packages updated, to benefit the agent functionalities (clipboard sharing etc..).

How To Test

 * start virt-manager
 * change default graphics type in preference dialog to Spice
 * create a new QEMU virtual machine
 * start the VM
 * switch to the VM console display, using the mouse/keyboard/audio etc...
 * switch between VNC or Spice on existing VM
 * once the agent installed on the guest, enjoy clipboard sharing & auto screen-resolution

User Experience
Easy experience to configure and use a Spice VM.

Dependencies

 * libvirt
 * python-virtinst
 * virt-manager

Contingency Plan
The feature can easily be disabled from virt-manager (and fallback on current VNC-only).

Documentation

 * http://elmarco.fedorapeople.org/spice-gtk/ API reference
 * http://spice-space.org/documentation.html
 * http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/index.html

Release Notes

 * With Fedora 15, virt-manager has been updated to support Spice, the complete open source solution for interaction with virtualized desktop. It's now possible to create a virtual machine with Spice support without touching the command line, and benefiting all the Spice enhancements easily directly from virt-manager. Thanks to the spice-gtk library, new client can be developed in Python or C, or with gobject-introspection bindings.

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/SpiceInVirtManager