We use customized versions of spice / kvm. Same versions ovirt ships with for compatibility reasons, with audio patches on the kvm side and spice patches for vp8 encoding the video streams. We've been meaning to make the repo for our custom patched versions public for a while, if you are interested i can accelerate that. Note, you also need patched versions of spice client if yours wasn't build with vp8 support, we have those too.
On the experimental side we have another in-progress set of patches that enable h264 encoding in spice, hardware accelerated with AMD W5100's, but this requires a lot of new software to be installed and a new kernel, CentOS 8 should fix most of that, so we'll probably re-base and release on that when the time is right.
The GPU's are not used for the guests at all, we only use them for the h264 encoding. AMD was picked to avoid proprietary drivers and stream limits. No RAM / SR-IOV needed, if you want 3d support you will be looking more for Nvidia-GRID.
Anyways, with just the patched software installed and some custom settings, video playback is about 95% the quality of native, takes about 40mbit/s per client to stream it. Audio has the occasional stutter, but it's not bad.
Thank you for sharing the informations Alex, they are very helpfull. I am now able to get sound from the vms, although performance is pretty poor even with "adjust for performance" setting in Win10. Cannot even talk about youtube video playing - freezing and crackling.Could you please be so kind to share the following infos:1. Have you upgraded the "spice-server" installed on the hosts with a newer version than 1.4.0 ? If so, could you provide me how could I get these packages ?2. What graphic card have you used for getting better graphic performance with the vms ? Im trying to understand what "accepted" card could I use with my 1U chassis servers...3. Is it only needed to install the card and the platform will alocate physical video memory to "desktop" vms ? ( Will the card RAM be automatically shared across the desktop tyoe vms running on top of the host ? )4. Is it necesarilly to activate sr-iov in the hosts bios or any other platform configurations ?I am really sorry for asking too many things, but im just trying to get these vdi vms working at least decent...Thank you so much !Leo---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: <alex@triadic.us>
Date: Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: [ovirt-users] Re: VDI
To: Leo David <leoalex@gmail.com>
Audio should just work as long as the VM is of the desktop type.
On Sep 24, 2019 6:50 AM, Leo David <leoalex@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you Alex,When you say "gpu backed" are you referring to sr-iov to share same gpu to multiple vms ?Any thoughts regarding passing audio form the vm to the client ?Did you do any update of the spice-server on the hosts ?Thanks,Leo
On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 12:01 PM <alex@triadic.us> wrote:I believe a lot of the package updates in CentOS 8 will solve some of the issues.But for now we get around them by disabling all visual effects on our VMS. If you are gpu backing the VMS with something like Nvidia grid the issues are non existent, but for non gpu backed VMS currently disabling all the effects is a must.We deploy the changes via gpo directly to the registry, so they take effect on first VM boot.
On Sep 24, 2019 2:03 AM, Leo David <leoalex@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you Alex from my side as well, very usefull information. I am the middle of vdi implementation as well, and i'm having issues with the spice console since 4.2, and it seems that latest 4.3 is still having the problem.What am i confrunting is:- spice console is very slaggy and slow for Win10 vms ( not even talking about running videos..)- i can't find a way to get audio from the vmAt the moment i am running 4.3, latest virt-viewer installed on the client, and latest qxl-dod driver installed on the vm.Any thoughts on solving video performance and audio redirection ?Thank you again,Leo
On Mon, Sep 23, 2019, 22:53 Alex McWhirter <Alex@triadic.us> wrote:_______________________________________________To achieve that all you need to do is create a template of the desktop base vm, make sure the vm type is set to desktop. Afterwards just create new vms from that template. As long as the VM type is set to desktop each new VM will use a qcow overlay on top of the base image.
Taking this a step further you can then create VM pools from said template, allowing users to dynamically be assigned a new VM on login. Granted pools are usually stateless, so you need to have network file storage. We use pools for windows 10 VDI instances, where we use sysprep to autojoin the new pool vm to the domain where redirected folders are already setup.
For VDI only use spice protocol. By default we found spice to be semi lackluster, so we do apply custom settings and we have recompiled spice on both servers and clients with h264 support. This is not 100% necessary, but makes things like youtube much more usable. We have also backported some audio patches to KVM. CentOS 8 should resolve a lot of these customizations that we've had to do.
As far as updating, pretty much. We create a VM from the template, update it, then push it back as a new version of the template. The pools are set to always use the latest template version. Users have to log out, then back in to the VDI system in order to get the new image as logging out will destroy the users current instance and create a new one on log in.
On 2019-09-23 15:16, Fabio Marzocca wrote:
Hi Alex, thanks for answering.I am approaching and studying oVirt in order to propose the solution to a customer as a replacement for a commercial solution they have now.They only need Desktop virtualization.Sorry for the silly question, but I can't find a way to deploy a VM (template) to users as a "linked-clone", meaning that the users' image still refers to the original image but modification are written (and afterwards read) from a new location. This technique is called Copy-on-write.Can this be achieved with oVirt?Then, what is the Best Practice to update WIndows OS for the all the users? Currently they simply "check-out" the Gold Image, update it and check-in, while all users are running...Fabio
On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 8:04 PM Alex McWhirter <Alex@triadic.us> wrote:yes, we do. All spice, with some customizations done at source level for spice / kvm packages.
On 2019-09-23 13:44, Fabio Marzocca wrote:
Is there anyone who uses oVirt as a full VDI environment? I would have a bunch of questions...
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Best regards, Leo David
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Best regards, Leo David