[Engine-devel] SPICE IP override

[Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 03:52:14AM -0500, Simon Grinberg wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Michal Skrivanek" <michal.skrivanek at redhat.com>
> > To: engine-devel at ovirt.org
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 10:39:58 PM
> > Subject: [Engine-devel] SPICE IP override
> >
> > Hi all,
> > On behalf of Tomas - please check out the proposal for enhancing our
> > SPICE integration to allow to return a custom IP/FQDN instead of the
> > host IP address.
> > http://wiki.ovirt.org/wiki/Features/Display_Address_Override
> > All comments are welcome...
>
> My 2 cents,
>
> This works under the assumption that all the users are either outside
> of the organization or inside.
> But think of some of the following scenarios based on a topology where
> users in the main office are inside the corporate network while users
> on remote offices / WAN are on a detached different network on the
> other side of the NAT / public firewall :
>
> With current 'per host override' proposal:
> 1. Admin from the main office won't be able to access the VM console
> 2. No Mixed environment, meaning that you have to have designated
>    clusters for remote offices users vs main office users - otherwise
>    connectivity to the console is determined based on scheduler
>    decision, or may break by live migration.
> 3. Based on #2, If I'm a user travelling between offices I'll have to
>    ask the admin to turn off my VM and move it to internal cluster
>    before I can reconnect
>
> My suggestion is to covert this to 'alternative' IP/FQDN sending the
> spice client both internal fqdn/ip and the alternative. The spice
> client should detect which is available of the two and auto-connect.
>
> This requires enhancement of the spice client, but still solves all
> the issues raised above (actually it solves about 90% of the use cases
> I've heard about in the past).
>
> Another alternative is for the engine to 'guess' or 'elect' which to
> use, alternative or main, based on the IP of the client - meaning
> admin provides the client ranges for providing internal host address
> vs alternative - but this is more complicated compared for the
> previous suggestion
>
> Thoughts?

I agree with where you're going with this. The story I'd like to see
supported is close to this. We have external customers who should know
nothing about our internal network, but should be able to access the
console of their VMs. Currently we do this with a custom frontend which
uses the API (and is about as old as the RHEV 2.2 API) and a TCP proxy,
but we'd like to move to the standard UI. Currently the console
connection prevents us from doing so.

Users are able to create VMs based on the resources they have (RAM, CPU,
storage, network) without admin intervention. This means we'd like to
see this override on a cluster / DC / global level so there is no need
for admin intervention. Ideally this would also come with a programmable
proxy so the engine can enable/disable forwards instead of a NAT
firewall.