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I have a new dedicated server that I'm going to create a couple of VMs on. OS will be CentOS 6.5, for the host and the VMs.

Does the GUI on the host (Gnome etc) give any real benefit when it comes to handling the VMs? Or is it just sucking up system resources unnecessarily? Can you quantify how much? Does it affect resources all the time, or only when I'm viewing it?

What does it enable me to do that I can't do from the command line with virsh etc?

This is an E5-1650 (6 core, 12 threads) box with 32GB ram.

If you're of the opinion that a GUI is a useful thing to have, can you tell me which packages I need to install. I know "yum install Desktop" does the job, but it installs a hell of a lot of dependencies, and I wondered if there's a slimline alternative?

Codemonkey
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1 Answers1

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From a security point of view, installing a GUI is a bad idea as it greatly expands the attack surface of the host. Certainly a GUI does take up some resources which could otherwise be used by the VM's. Gnome will take up resources whenever it is running - regardless of whether or not you are using it.

The solution I typically use is to NOT install a GUI on the server, but install the minimal requirements (xauth package), access the machine via SSH and then run virt-manager through SSH such that it exports onto my workstation. The added benefit being I can do this from anywhere (and I can enable compression on SSH for slower connections as well)

davidgo
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