Today I tested OracleVM (OVM) templates on their own distribution of Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5 with seeded VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X. All went fine, but the VNC connection to virtual machine was not painless as I expected.
[[email protected] ~]# rpm -qa "vnc|xen" kernel-xen-2.6.18-128.el5 xen-3.0.3-80.el5 kmod-gfs-xen-0.1.31-3.el5 kmod-cmirror-xen-0.1.21-10.el5 vnc-4.1.2-14.el5 kmod-gnbd-xen-0.1.5-2.0.1.el5 vnc-server-4.1.2-14.el5
On a brand new OEL5 system with virtualization support, I have created a new virtual machine with a fresh OEL4 (plain OS), and set appropriate memory for the virtual domain using the Xen management user interface commands. I also checked if the VNC port was allocated with the command virsh dumpxml:
[[email protected] ~]# xm create /OVS/running_pool/OVM_EL4U6_X86_PVM_4GB/vm.cfg Using config file "/OVS/running_pool/OVM_EL4U6_X86_PVM_4GB/vm.cfg". Started domain OVM_EL4U6_X86_PVM_4GB [[email protected] ~]# xm mem-set 1 1024 [[email protected] ~]# xm list Name ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State Time(s) Domain-0 0 997 2 r----- 284.5 OVM_EL4U6_X86_PVM_4GB 1 1023 1 -b---- 73.6 [[email protected] ~]# virsh dumpxml OVM_EL4U6_X86_PVM_4GB |grep port <graphics type='vnc' port='5900' listen='0.0.0.0'/> [[email protected] ~]# netstat -l |grep 5900 tcp 0 0 *:5900 *:* LISTEN
Now I expected that VNC Viewer would simply connect to the console of VM, but it displayed only the very first frame and then died after a few moments with a Connection reset by peer (104) error:
[[email protected] ~]# vncviewer localhost:0 VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X - built Jan 21 2009 14:35:26 Copyright (C) 2002-2005 RealVNC Ltd. See https://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC. Fri Aug 14 15:59:24 2009 CConn: connected to host localhost port 5900 CConnection: Server supports RFB protocol version 3.8 CConnection: Using RFB protocol version 3.8 TXImage: Using default colormap and visual, PseudoColor, depth 8. Fri Aug 14 15:59:25 2009 CConn: Using pixel format depth 6 (8bpp) rgb222 CConn: Using ZRLE encoding Fri Aug 14 15:59:29 2009 CConn: Throughput 20156 kbit/s - changing to hextile encoding CConn: Throughput 20156 kbit/s - changing to full colour CConn: Using pixel format depth 8 (8bpp) colour-map CConn: Using hextile encoding main: read: Connection reset by peer (104)
As I was able to see the VM console for a while, my first guess was that it would be related to the virtual system itself, so I decided to create another virtual domain to see if the problem is replicable. And yes, it was! (Well, in addition to the 104 error I got another one: Broken pipe (32), which was very likely related to domain auto-restarts, and easily traceable by xm list command showing the current VM domain ID changes.)
And the solution for Connection reset by peer (104)? I noticed that VNC Viewer’s default setting is auto-encoding selection, which means first use ZRLE and then switch to hextile if possible—that creates a problem here. When I set any encoding (fixed to either ZRLE or hextile), it started to work well:
[[email protected] ~]# vncviewer localhost:0 PreferredEncoding=Hextile VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for X - built Jan 21 2009 14:35:26 Copyright (C) 2002-2005 RealVNC Ltd. See https://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC. Fri Aug 14 18:10:39 2009 CConn: connected to host localhost port 5900 CConnection: Server supports RFB protocol version 3.8 CConnection: Using RFB protocol version 3.8 TXImage: Using default colormap and visual, PseudoColor, depth 8. Fri Aug 14 18:10:40 2009 CConn: Using pixel format depth 6 (8bpp) rgb222 CConn: Using hextile encoding
Do you have any related or similar issues to share?
3 Comments. Leave new
Hi,
How was the system performance after the migration? Was it better than on the SPARC system, equal or still worst?
Thanks for sharing this nice info with us!
Thanks for Your comments ‘Statistique’! There was no performance benchmarking done so far, but at the very first sight the virtual system was responding very well. If you have any testing scenario in a mind, feel free to contact me on polnicky (at)pythian.com so we can later compare results.
Hi Jan,
I have had this issue many times before and the problem you are having is most probably related to the password you are using – is it complex and long enough? Note that it cannot be set to something simple like a dictionary word.
On the other hand, if you’re using OVM you can use the VNC from the host machine – (to connect locally instead of using guest systems’s VNC server software).
Nashle,
Pawel