Is this even possible?

J

jtvd78

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2009
Messages
303
There's probablly a name for this, I just don't know exactly what it is called.

I just ordered parts for an ESXi whitebox. It has 8 cores, and 32GB RAM, so it should have plenty of performance for what I need it for. Something I want to do on it, is test out linux distros/play around with linux/get more comfortable with linux.

Would there be a way I could somehow directly control a VM on my VM host through my main computer? I guess I could use VNC or something, but I assume there might be a more 'integrated' way of doing this. Like, I want to be able to control the VM as if It was actually running on my computer, while it is actually fully running on my server.

EDIT: Unrelated question, though its not worth making a whole new thread. Should I have several VMs for different services? or should I pack a couple in a single VM. Like, If I wanted to run an FTP server, a webserver, and a minecraft server, should I give them each their own VM, or put them into the same linux VM.
 
You can VNC as you said but you can also do a full screen console of the VM on your PC. Open the VM console in the vSphere Client and then enter full screen mode :)
 
SCSI said:
You can VNC as you said but you can also do a full screen console of the VM on your PC. Open the VM console in the vSphere Client and then enter full screen mode :)
Click to expand...

Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. And would it have any effect if I passed a video card to the VM that I am using? or would that not really make a difference

And does this full screen console support multiple monitors? does vnc?
 
If you want to see the results of GPU passthrough then take a look at the Supermicro thread.. It works very well for me and a few others are starting to try it..
 
jtvd78 said:
There's probablly a name for this, I just don't know exactly what it is called.

I just ordered parts for an ESXi whitebox. It has 8 cores, and 32GB RAM, so it should have plenty of performance for what I need it for. Something I want to do on it, is test out linux distros/play around with linux/get more comfortable with linux.

Would there be a way I could somehow directly control a VM on my VM host through my main computer? I guess I could use VNC or something, but I assume there might be a more 'integrated' way of doing this. Like, I want to be able to control the VM as if It was actually running on my computer, while it is actually fully running on my server.

EDIT: Unrelated question, though its not worth making a whole new thread. Should I have several VMs for different services? or should I pack a couple in a single VM. Like, If I wanted to run an FTP server, a webserver, and a minecraft server, should I give them each their own VM, or put them into the same linux VM.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I'm ignorant about ESXi (I'm used to Linux), but why not get a Xen hypervisor? In fact, you could download any major Linux distribution and install and run a Xen hypervisor quite easily. From there on there are tools that help create VMs, etc. Though a Xen guest config file is no rocket science either.

Best of all, you got several options for (near-)native hardware support inside the VMs:

1. PV guests (paravirtualized guests) - Xen offers some prepackaged Linux guests with PV drivers that allow these guests to access hardware resources with a bare-metal like performance.

2. HVM guests (or fully virtualized guests) with PV drivers. Xen has some nice PV drivers for MS Windows guests that greatly enhance network speed and disk (I/O) performance.

3. PCI / VGA passthrough. I think the VMware guys call that "VMDirectPath", though I don't know if VGA passthrough is supported by VMware. Anyway, Xen has been doing that for some time now. With Xen I "pass through" my secondary graphics card to my Windows 7 guest, which allows Windows to directly access the GPU. PCI passthrough is the same but for PCI cards/devices such as USB host controllers, SATA controllers, network cards, etc. It has very specific requirements as to the hardware!!! But it's the ultimate solution to me.

If you need to remotely access your VM, you can also use ssh -X user@youripaddress from a Linux or Apple machine. Of course your VM should run a ssh server.

From a Linux machine, you can also use the Remmina remote desktop client, which supports several protocols including RDP, VNC, NX, SFTP, and SSH.

If you use Xen, you can use virt-manager (a separate package) from the command line which opens a graphical user interface and includes a VNC client - very handy for installing new VMs and running them.

Soon enough you'll write your own startup scripts for your VMs, or place a launcher on your desktop like I did:
Code: 
gksu xm create /etc/xen/win7.cfg
I just click the icon (launcher) and 15-20 seconds later I'm in my Windows VM.

Good luck!
 
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