SPICE console
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.
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: