[K12OSN] SPICE anyone?

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Burroughs, Henry <HBurroughs at hhprep.org> wrote:
>
> Is SPICE the surprise counterpart/replacement for LTSP?  Seems like a nice Christmas gift to me.
>
> http://www.techworld.com.au/article/329382/red_hat_open_sources_desktop_application_protocol
>
>

Here is the announcement
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/spice-os.html

Here is the network transport technology
http://www.spice-space.org/

Here is what Red Hat is offering
http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/

(the whitepaper in the above link is very good at explaining the technology)

To me it seems like a hybrid adaptive tech that takes from (ltsp +
local apps + local devices) + Virtualization (KVM) + nomachine's NX

As I understand it, it's providing rendering of kvm virtual machines
remotely through spice. But with optimized adaptive load of video
rendering between client and server with working audio (both ways)
(That's amazing!).

The cool part is it can run both Windows and Linux at the same time!
The down side is you now have 30 VM's to manage instead of 1 ltsp
server. Maybe the GUI manager will make this easy.

Seems like users can be given root access to their own VM's (if you
want) but I think this is not a good idea anyway. Or maybe just give
them priviliges to install official packages, as was the initial case
with Fedora 12.

Part of the reason ltsp and drbl are so nice is that if you
install/remove software it is done for all (some may find this a
drawback, I do not). Now you don't have multiple physical box OS's to
manage but virtual ones (a vm file) none the less. The problem is if
you want to modify say a common file in /etc for printer
configuration. You could script it (as DRBL does) to modify all
clients (if they resided on the same filesystem) but now you must
enter the vm (run it) to do so.

In addition,  I think running 30 entire OS's (with all the associated
processes) will need higher server req than just 30 Desktop
environments (gnome) + running apps. Although it is cool that you can
isolate and partition hardware resources so no user can effectively
take down the server. It's also cool that you can dynamically give
some users more/less computing power (cpu/ram).

Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like a client needs an OS with a browser
first before it can accept a remote desktop session. Where does the
spice client reside? But this may be an advantage for it's purpose as
it seems to work over a WAN.

I think overall it has some great new features. But I think it may be
geared towards more enterprise customers where they want mixed
environments and real remote (WAN) access.



--
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada