I’m starting my adventures into running a Homelab this coming week and I have settled on running OpenSUSE Leap as my host OS. I want to run VM’s on the machine, however WebYAST doesn’t seem to be available for the time being on 42.3, or if it is, it asks me to break stuff on installing it.
I have looked at Kimchi, but that seems horribly broken. I have looked into using Openstack, but that looks big and bloated. I haven’t looked at oVirt or webvirt much. All of this has been under VMWare, not on real hardware (that arrives tomorrow )
Managing them is good, seeing consoles / desktops would be great.
I do plan on running SBS2011 as the machine comes with a license for it, in a VM, but I plan on passing a GPU to that to use as a desktop, once the nanny locks have been disabled on it. But seeing the desktop output in the browser would be good for remote management, as I don’t want the open ports for RDP. I plan on running a Guacamole server in Docker, as well as the web client viewer too.
I have looked at using Proxmox, as well as unRAID, but both of them are too commercial, and having to modify the PVE apt sources.list before it can be updated has put me off. Having ran 42.3 for a week or so on my laptop has made it clear to me that this is the OS of choice for me and my server.
So, to get back to my actual question, how can I manage (and possibly see) my VMs in a web browser?
Depending on what you need,
There a number of recommendations are possible.
I don’t generally recommend a web tool, but use a SSH client (on Windows you can use putty), it’s possible to support a remote graphical Desktop that way if you wish.
First,
There seems to be some confusion about virtualization managers like libvirt and massively capable deployment infrastructure like OpenStack (which implements libvirt). The two are different and one can not be interchanged with the other.
I’d assume that first and foremost you are looking for a way to manage an openSUSE Guest.
Like most Linux, openSUSE can best be managed by command line using SSH.
But, that doesn’t mean you have to do without a tool like YaST… Once you’re logged in, assuming you’re permitted to “su” or “sudo” (you may have to modify security policy), you can simply run “yast” to run YaST in ncurses mode (using text in a graphical representation). Because this doesn’t require a Desktop, it’s very fast and responsive.
Or,
It’s common to allow remote desktop functionality.
You can pass X over SSH. If you like this (it only requires opening ports for SSH), this is simple to set up… Run the YaST Remote Administration module to set up VNC but don’t open the VNC firewall ports. You will then be able to remote in and pass X over SSH immediately.
You can open ports for VNC (YaST will help you set that up).
You can install a remote desktop server using another protocol like RDP if you’re a MSWindows shop, this will also require opening required ports.
When you install a Windows Guest, you can configure any remote desktop similarly. Because SBS has its own special RDP functionality, I’d recommend configuring support for that.
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