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.
![[Note]](../common/images/admon/note.png) | Note |
|---|---|
If you do not configure SPICE correctly, Compute falls back on VNC. |
The following table shows the options to configure SPICE as the console for OpenStack Compute:
| Configuration option=Default value | Description |
| agent_enabled=True | (BoolOpt) enable spice guest agent support |
| enabled=False | (BoolOpt) enable spice related features |
| enabled=False | (BoolOpt) Whether the V3 API is enabled or not |
| 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 |
