I would like to use my opensuse 11.0 server to occasionally run a minimal install of Windows XP. I am well versed in linux and can handle compiling and installing any necessary packages, however, I am not sure which virtualization software to use. Here are a few of the issues I would like to have resolved.
#1 - My server is a stand-alone box. I would like to be be able to VNC into the virtual environment or ssh and tunnel the X11 display to my workstation and then detach it. Something that will allow me to start the OS, control it for a bit and then let it keep running.
#2 - The reason I want to do this is for a computer game that requires that a user be logged in to sell his/her items. That means that the VM display will need to be able to display the game’s screen as I login and proceed to set up my shop. I have had problems with doing this over VNC on my workstation before but I am guessing the the virtualization software will have lower level control and not have any problems with displaying Directx graphics.
Please let me know if you have any recommendations about which package of tools I should use. Thanks a lot!
hi
i have used virtualbox ose under suse 11, kde3.5 in pretty much the same scenario; works great although you have to do a bit of manual configuration on the host pc to get remote access to the guest OS.
the real problem you will face is none of the remote access tools (eg VNC or RDP) are very good with sending graphics over the network - RDP is a lot worse than VNC as you can at least specify the colour depth in VNC.
i also believe that VBOX OSE isn’t very good with 3d graphics so the game would run like a dead badger anyway.
still, VirtualBOX OSE is free and the worst that can happen is you can discover it doesn’t work to your needs and try something else
Add the Community Repo > Virtualisation then do a search for Virtualbox. For remote access you’ll need to:-
Stop & close the VM & the VBox GUI
Open Konsole and use these commands in this order:-
Replace “XP” with the NAME of your Virtual machine
Replace “rdp” with an arbitary name of your choice for the connection description
Oh, one other thing to note is ensure you install the appropriate VBOX Kernel module for your running Kernel - Suse11 seems to install the PAE kernel as default now :\
After reading about xen and some of the problems people have been having with it so far I think that VirtualBox or VMware is the safest course for now also. The video game ism’t too graphics intensive either so hopefully this is the solution im looking for.
Just so that I understand what is being done here, these commands are opening a port for the VNC or RDP server to listen and accept connections right? Are there some VBox config files that will allow me to setup and configure the VNC server as well?
It’s worth a go, like i said before, nothing to loose!
Yes, VirtualBox runs it’s own internal proxy, although you will find initially, the guest can “see” your LAN and the internet, you can not get TO it from the HOST or another machine on the LAN; using those commands will allow inbound connections to the guest OS.
In the example I wrote above, it forwards port 3389 on the HOST to port 3389 on the GUEST (3389 is RDP’s default port), you can change it to whatever port you like as long as the HOST port is above port # 1024
AFAIK there are no config files you can just dump a list of “source port”/“destination port”/“alias”, you have to do them manually though the HOST’s shell.
You can work out the syntax from the examples I gave but in brief, use the following
Command 1 - Determine the protocol (TCP or UDP for example)
Command 2 - Determine the GUEST port to use
Command 3 - Determine the HOST port to use
The example I gave is also based on using the 1st virtual network card and the default type of card. Each GUEST can have 4 Virtual NICS and various ‘brands’ so it can get a little confusing!
Good luck, and don’t forget to post back to let us know how it went!!
