Cygwin, KVM, and X Window

With the conversion of systems from VMware over to KVM, and of course just managing the KVM servers, I need to document the process for accessing the servers and viewing consoles.

I’ve been using cygwin for many years. I’ve even used the X Window system to access X applications on servers. For the purpose of accessing KVM VMs, we’ll bring up a terminal and start X:

startx

This brings up a full screen window. Generally not bad but I have a 43″ monitor so it’s pretty large. Resize it down to a more manageable size and in the term window, ssh over to the KVM server. Mine is my Nikodemus system at 192.168.5.10. Pass the -Y option to tell ssh this is to be used as a tunnel with the X Window system.

ssh -Y 192.168.5.10

To make sure it worked, verify your DISPLAY environment variable. It should show something like this:

printenv | grep -i display
DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

Since it’s a tunnel, it’ll show localhost.

Now you can start the virt-manager for viewing all the VMs, regardless of status, or virt-viewer which shows only the running VMs. Note that resizing is done by clicking on the double box in the upper right corner of the window.