Spice breaking my VM's

[platinumjsi]

I have a couple of VM's I run ontop of FreeNAS, with the latest update it appears VNC is no more and we have spice.
After a few mins the VM stops accepting input, refreshing the page seems to fix this, however after a while doing this will result in a black screen and a few seconds later ill be presented with the login screen for my VM (Linux Mint) and have to start the VM's work up again.
Any idea why it is doing this, its very frustrating and making the system unusable for my VM's currently.

Any help appreciated.

 

[michael-stefanski]

I have a couple of VM's I run ontop of FreeNAS, with the latest update it appears VNC is no more and we have spice.
After a few mins the VM stops accepting input, refreshing the page seems to fix this, however after a while doing this will result in a black screen and a few seconds later ill be presented with the login screen for my VM (Linux Mint) and have to start the VM's work up again.
Any idea why it is doing this, its very frustrating and making the system unusable for my VM's currently.

Any help appreciated.

This is a serious regression when upgrading to TrueNAS Scale cobia 23.10. Upgraders with VMs beware! The old VNC was able to maintain logged in GUI sessions for months, which was crucial in jobs that required a working GUI (think browsers that scrape web pages). The new spice driver does lock up (mostly disconnect mouse and keyboard). After 2-5 mins the spice driver just kills the GUI session and login tot he machine, even cron! The workaround that I found so far (worked for the past 24 hours, so small sample) is to keep a terminal open with an app running like 'top' The constant flashing of processes makes spice think that something is happening. Give that a try.

 

[jrp]

EXACT same issue - pretty much unusable

First forcing a console password and not allowing the user to determine if required now the console is useless once you get connected

A buddy moved to PROXMOX and if this is not fixed tout de suite I will switch from Truenas Scale

EXTREMELY disappointed in the recent changes to the platform that is destroying its reputation

 

[michael-stefanski]

I had the 'htop' terminal app workaround working for a couple of weeks. Just had a huge crash of all VMs, all sessions disconnected. I see three options:
1. Move back to scale Bluefin (that requires destroying vdevs, since ZFS version is upgraded in Cobia).
2. Move to Truenas Core (same deal, requires destroying vdevs, copying data).
3. Installing Rustdesk on my VMs.

Did anyone try any of these? What's your pick for best option?

 

[Louis2]

The old VNC was able to maintain logged in GUI sessions for months, which was crucial in jobs that required a working GUI (think browsers that scrape web pages). The new spice driver does lock up (mostly disconnect mouse and keyboard). After 2-5 mins the spice driver just kills the GUI session and login tot he machine, even cron!

YEP Same problem!!

I also have a communication problem between keyboard and mouse and the application running on the VM, not sure which side SPICE or VM is causing that !!

 

[panzerscope]

Yeah, Spice is a massive step backwards, I have the exact same issue. Fortunately I can get into the VM via Teamviewer, but I have times I would like to use the standard GUI. Spice is rubbish is its current guise.

 

[anodos]

Yeah, Spice is a massive step backwards, I have the exact same issue. Fortunately I can get into the VM via Teamviewer, but I have times I would like to use the standard GUI. Spice is rubbish is its current guise.

You might be able to hack around on the NAS to allow remote virt-manager (tunneled via SSH) from a linux client. IIRC I've done this in the past when I just wanted to use the virt-manager GUI on my laptop to manage VMs on TrueNAS. The UX was superior to both SPICE and VNC.

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, it looks janky and weird, but virt-manager works surprisingly well.

might be able to hack around on the NAS to allow remote virt-manager

At least on a standard distro, it's readily available via SSH with no special setup.