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Comment by vero2 | Hacker News Reader

We have several windows vms running in virtualbox. All have rdp/vnc for specialised programs. (These are offline).

Everytime I tried to migrate to qemu or virt-manager or gnome-boxes it was a real nightmare especially installing SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking. I read in Phoronix the performance of virtualbox is subpar and all KVM/qemu is the way to go.

Please, could the OSS community build a easy to use GUI that SPICE+virtio drivers+ networking is made simple. Any one from qemu, I really appreciate the work but still very challenging for sysadmins.

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About 12 years ago when I had access to Microsoft MSDN I got a big SuperMicro box, set it up with CentOS 4 (RHEL) Linux, and used QEMU/KVM to set up a Windows domain controller and several other Windows VMs, and several Linux VMs, on a couple of virtual subnets, along with iptables port forwarding, Windows Remote Desktop, VNC, and many services. Some of the Linux VMs services authenticated with the Windows domain. I wanted to set up at least one non-x86/x64 emulated-CPU VM but never got that working very well in QEMU.

The exercise was a good (and incremental) learning experience and increased my general networking and sys-admin knowledge, which I've used well as part of my software engineering career. I would have been lost in many professional situations without it. QEMU/KVM are awesome.

EDIT: more and better words

So basically what you're saying is RTFM, in a polite fashion :)

Virt-manager seems to be written in Python. So if libvirt supports the bits you want then with some tinkering in GTK you might be able to bolt the controls onto Virt-manager, at least to get things started.

I confess that I haven't run Windows with virt-manager on my own desktop in a long while, but it worked just fine after installing the required drivers at install time. IIRC Redhat distributes signed drivers for Windows for free.

The problems I did have were with VMs I tried to convert from VMware to KVM, and those stemmed from Windows' inability (version 7) to properly handle changing hardware. Perhaps it's better at nowadays.

Did this recently. It runs ok, but input and responsiveness latency is very noticeable.

I mainly use windows + libvirt for gaming. But I also have an instance on a dedicated server for a remote development environment.

I would say forget spice + libvirt graphics layer. Use RDP, if on linux remmina work's great. RDP will outperform in my experience SPICE. I've also had constant troubles with the vga/qxl/virtio graphics.

Secondily for virtio: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-win...

There is an iso at the above link. Grab that and have it added during install. When you get to the select a drive. None will show up until you load the virtiostorage driver.

There are a lot of nuances to first setting up a windows vm. But the performance is great. It has removed the need for a windows install for gaming at all.

Install the guest tools for windows from here

https://www.spice-space.org/download.html

It will contain everything you need for a fairly seamless experience on windows, and libvirtd and virt-manager make host side a cakewalk as well.

TBH, I tend to give up on the accelerated video drivers on Windows inside of virt-manager. It is often easier to just use RDP for basic office applications.

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