Priorities:

Security has high priority in all aspects. Scalability, ease of use and price are close seconds and performance also have a say.

What I am trying to do:

I am trying to run a minimal (and therefore without GUI) install of linux run a vm with windows (including GUI). The linux part only needs responsibility for starting the windows client and providing security.

I am currently trying to do it by utilising kvm. I have managed to get it to work through the command line, but only inside a desktop system e.g. GNOME. I ran it through libvirt (virt-install) and virt-viewer and also made it work as described in this guide.

I am running CentOS atm but it was primarily to choose an OS, so suggestions about smaller images with specific advantages are welcome.

The problem:

When I try the 2 options above from none desktop environment I get:
Gtk-WARNING **: [current time]: cannot open display:
I have tried to do some googling, but I keep finding posts about headless servers and X11. I am not trying to make a headless server and I am not sure how X11 should fix my problem.

Request:

How do I start a vm (windows with GUI) from the terminal on a system which doesn't have a GUI (linux without desktop).

For the client machines: where the MS-Windows on VM, will be run. You will need an X11 server.

X11 server

X11 is part of the windowing system used on Gnu/Linux, Unix, VMS, and some other systems. It combines a canvas, keyboard, mouse. The X server is not the windowing system, but is needed to run one.

Beware many people think of a server as being remote. This is false. An X11 server runs locally. The clients can run remotely.

A windowing system e.g. Gnome.

Is made of

• The window-manager: responsible for moving, resizing, lowering, raising, windows.


• Task manager, start button, notification area, etc.

You don't need a windowing system, especially if you only run one window. There are other tools that can make a window become full screen.

I read that you have a hypervisor machine running Linux that will run a VM, and that VM needs to have a graphical environment. But the hypervisor does not have a graphical environment and probably doesn't even have a display.

What you should do instead is to install virt-manager on your own workstation, and the configure virt-manager to make a connection (via ssh tunnel) to the hypervisor machine. You can then manage the VMs running on that machine from your workstation, including viewing the graphics console of the VM, with all data sent over the ssh tunnel.

From the sounds of it you are trying to run a windows VM on KVM with PCI pass-through of the graphics card, without the host OS taking control of it. I have not personally tried to run a set-up like this but I understand some people have had success with running two graphics cards and giving control of the second to the VM.

https://heiko-sieger.info/running-windows-10-on-linux-using-kvm-with-vga-passthrough/

In the tutorial they mention that,the UEFI firmware initializes the GPU and loads a modified vBios from the GPU. This can cause problems if you try to pass through the only GPU attached to the computer.

When booting these host platforms, the host UEFI initializes the GPU and makes a somewhat modified “shadow copy” of the GPU’s vBIOS. Later when you start the VM, Linux exposes this crippled shadow BIOS to the guests UEFI loader. The same happens when you try to passthrough your primary (and only) GPU to the guest. A telltale sign is the following error when running the VM start script:

qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=02:00.0,multifunction=on: Failed to mmap 0000:02:00.0 BAR 3. Performance may be slow