OpenStack Compute has long had support for VNC consoles to guests. The VNC protocol is fairly limited, lacking support for multiple monitors, bi-directional audio, reliable cut+paste, video streaming and more. SPICE is a new protocol which aims to address all the limitations in VNC, to 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 using
SPICE-over-websockets. The nova-spicehtml5proxy
service communicates directly with the hypervisor process using
SPICE.
Options for configuring SPICE as the console for OpenStack Compute can be found below.
| Configuration option=Default value | (Type) Description |
| agent_enabled=True | (BoolOpt)enable spice guest agent support |
| enabled=False | (BoolOpt)enable spice related features |
| html5proxy_base_url=http://127.0.0.1:6080/spice_auto.html | (StrOpt)location of spice html5 console proxy, in the form "http://127.0.0.1:6080/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 |
