Hey,
I just figured out what is probably the easiest way to view VMs with Spice protocol enabled from Windows.
I figured that might be helpful to people on this board since there’s lots of people using KVM but spending time on Windows desktops.
I pretty much always use Windows (I like Linux, but I get more done in Windows myself) so I am really happy to have this capability to view my KVM VMs when I need to and not be limited just to SSH (I guess there’s always VNC but this is easier and KVM defaults to Spice protocol, so…)
Anyway, here’s what to do:
Head on over to https://virt-manager.org/download/ and download either 32 or 64-bit virt-viewer MSI installer for Windows (doesn’t matter which if you have 64-bit Windows - if you’re on 32-bit, get 32-bit because 64-bit won’t work…)
https://www.spice-space.org/download.html is also a good resource for all things Spice…
Install the Virt-Viewer MSI - if SmartScreen throws an “unknown vendor” error just ignore it and install anyway. If you’re paranoid, there’s a GPG key on the virt-viewer web page you can use to scan the MSI.
Then go to C:\Program Files (x86)\VirtViewer v5.0-256\bin (32-bit version) or C:\Program FilesVirtViewer v5.0-256\bin (64-bit version) and look for the executable named remote-viewer.exe
Double click on remote-viewer.exe and it’ll bring up a window. In the top bar, type the IP or FQDN and port of your Spice VM address-bar style and hit enter, like so: spice://192.168.1.200:5900 or spice://kvm.vm.localdomain:5900
That should be it, you should see the GUI of your VM now. If you have any problems, try adding a rule in Windows Firewall for remote-viewer.exe - if that doesn’t work, try the opening the port you’re using. For convenience, I pinned the icon to my taskbar since I know I’ll be using it a lot and don’t want to have to navigate to the folder every time.
There’s a ton of other apps inside the bin folder, too. I am trying to figure out how to connect using Virsh next - not that I am an expert or anything, but it’s pretty cool that it’s an option…
Oh, last thing - mostly unrelated - if you install Git in Windows it installs a full-featured Bash TTY that’s great for SSH, Nano/vim/emacs/[insert your favorite text editor], SCP, generating keys, etc. all from inside Windows pretty much just like you’re in Linux - you can even edit the ~/.bashrc and /etc/profile to your heart’s content. It’s not as heavy (or full-featured) as installing an entire compatibility layer like Cygwin so it’s a nice option for people that primarily use *Nix machines remotely and just need the interface.
Questions? Ask! Hope that helps someone!
Oh, and if you figure out how to connect Virsh, tell me how!
Edit: I searched the program’s root and noticed there’s also libgtk-vnc-2.0-0.dll and libvnc-1.0-0.dll libraries, it might also work with VNC by replacing the spice:// with vnc:// in the address bar. I don’t have any VNC VMs ATM so I haven’t tested it, would someone try it out and report back?