Notes about virtual.globaleaks.org server - 2langnic/GlobaLeaks GitHub Wiki

virtual.globaleaks.org is a dedicated server used to create temporary virtual machines where to test globaleaks developement softwares.

As the machine os a little bit old, some limitations occurs in the hypervisor.

More precisely, the machine have an old 32bit XEON CPU, and it doesn't have any vtx instruction, so, no hw virtualization is supported. For this reason we cannot run KVM nor XEN-HVM on it, and as ganeti, the virtual machine daemon used, support only kvm and xen, the only remaining hypervisor is XEN-PVM.

Running virtual machines on a 32bit host with xen-pvm raises some limits on what we can really support, as paravirtualized guest machines needs a modified kernel/OS to run, and this is translated in "no windows, no proprietary kernel/os support".

Also, on a 32bit host you can run only 32bit guests, so, no 64 bit linux or any other system can run as a guest machine.

As the requirement for globaleaks actually are just to test software on Ubuntu 12.04, this isn't a big issue, we can have 32 bit linux with ubuntu and ubuntu defaul xen patched kernel running, so, we can achieve our goals.

But xen-pvm on ganeti have another little limitation: no VNC console is provided/supported for guests. We use ganeti-webmgr to serve a web based administration gui on top of ganeti, and usually ganeti-webmgr serve also an HTML5 based VNC client to connect to the guests console/display. With xen-pvm hypervisor on ganeti, there is no VNC console, so, the web-vnc doesn't work.

To access the console you must first login by ssh on the host and then perform a "gnt-instance console machinename" command. To access the GUI of the guests a vnc server installed in the guest is needed, it must be exposed on a public ip, and then you can connect to it using a stand-alone vnc client of your choice.