OpenStack Compute supports VNC consoles to guests. The VNC protocol is fairly limited, lacking support for multiple monitors, bi-directional audio, reliable cut-and-paste, video streaming and more. SPICE is a new protocol that aims to address the limitations in VNC and provide good remote desktop support.
SPICE support in OpenStack Compute shares a similar
architecture to the VNC implementation. The OpenStack dashboard
uses a SPICE-HTML5 widget in its console tab that communicates to
the nova-spicehtml5proxy
service by using SPICE-over-websockets. The nova-spicehtml5proxy service
communicates directly with the hypervisor process by using SPICE.
VNC must be explicitly disabled to get access to the SPICE console.
Set the vnc_enabled option to False in
the [DEFAULT] section to disable the VNC console.
Use the following options to configure SPICE as the console for OpenStack Compute:
| Configuration option = Default value | Description |
|---|---|
| [spice] | |
| agent_enabled = True | (BoolOpt) Enable spice guest agent support |
| enabled = False | (BoolOpt) Enable spice related features |
| html5proxy_base_url = http://127.0.0.1:6082/spice_auto.html | (StrOpt) Location of spice HTML5 console proxy, in the form "http://127.0.0.1:6082/spice_auto.html" |
| keymap = en-us | (StrOpt) Keymap for spice |
| server_listen = 127.0.0.1 | (StrOpt) IP address on which instance spice server should listen |
| server_proxyclient_address = 127.0.0.1 | (StrOpt) The address to which proxy clients (like nova-spicehtml5proxy) should connect |
