Usermode VM server

[kousu]

Edit the wiki to explain how to use virt-manager on our systems to run VMs; see https://github.com/neuropoly/computers/issues/461

• [ ] Document on the lab manual how to use virt-manager via X forwarding

  At this point, we can start letting people use it. This will let people ssh -X joplin virt-manager

• [ ] Document on the lab manual how to install virt-manager on macOS (brew install virt-manager)

• [ ] Document on the lab manual how to add a remote server to virt-manager: it's qemu+ssh://$GRAMES_USER@$STATION.neuro.polymtl.ca/session, added via the "Custom URI" option; nothing else will work, but that's very much not obvious

  The "/system" option allows you to use ssh, but not "/session", and the "/session" option doesn't allow you to use ssh:  

• [ ] Document the workaround for the socket length glitch: disable qemu-guest-agent

• [ ] Document on the lab manual that in the typical case people need to download a .iso via command line tools; it can't be done from the virt-manager UI

  • virt-manager and virt-install can install from the web using an "install tree" like https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-amd64/, but as far as I can tell this is a linux-specific thing so it's not that interesting to us; most of our need for VMs are going to be Windows and macOS.

• [ ] Document on the lab manual how to import a .vmdk, or a set of .vmdks

  More esoteric cases like this sometimes require using some command line tools.

• [ ] Document on the lab manual how to manage machines from Windows This seems harder. virt-manager doesn't exist for Windows, but virt-viewer does; it's much less friendly: https://virt-manager.org/download. So people could either:

  • install Ubuntu in WSL2 and maybe install virt-manager in that
  • use virsh + virt-viewer
  • ?

[kousu]

@namgo would you be willing to do this? I know writing docs isn't always the most fun thing, so if you're not down well, maybe we can split the work, or see if anyone else can take part of the job.