[virt-tools-list] Supporting remote connections to QEMU session mode

[Cole Robinson]

On 07/03/2015 02:01 AM, sbaugh at catern.com wrote:
> 
> (please keep me CC'd, I'm not subscribed to this list)
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Has there been any thought given to supporting remote connections to
> QEMU session instances in virt-manager?
> (i.e. qemu+ssh://hostname/session?socket=path) Manually hacking in the
> URI with dconf seems to mostly work, but (for example) I quickly
> encountered a bug when creating a VM where virt-manager assumed the only
> usable storage pool was my *local* homedir instead of the remote
> homedir.
> 
> virsh and other tools support these connections just fine.
> 
> The reason I want to remotely connect to a QEMU session instance is
> because with qemu-bridge-helper giving unprivileged access to bridges,
> if one also does chmod 666 /dev/kvm, QEMU session instances actually
> become quite useful. You can run actual production VMs with them.
> 
> Specifically, I want to use them as a way to roll out a virtual machine
> service for all the students at my university: Just give them a shell
> account, set some ulimits and tell them how to make a session-mode
> vm. (I know, there are some flaws in my ability to really do limits
> here, but it's enough for my use case). If they were able to use
> virt-manager instead of virsh to manage those VMs, it would sure make it
> easier for them... and I think there are a lot of this kind of use case
> that are enabled by the existence of qemu-bridge-helper.
> 

Honestly I didn't even realize that's possible. Feel free to file an upstream
bug for it: https://virt-manager.org/bugs/

Thanks,
Cole