Guest setup

Nothing inside the guest is needed to open a SPICE or VNC console. Two things make the rest work: the QEMU guest agent, and for SPICE the guest tools.

QEMU guest agent

The agent lets Proxmox VE ask the running OS for its network addresses. cv4pve-vdi uses it to:

• find the IP address for services (RDP, SSH) and for Discover;
• show the agent badge on the VM.

Install the agent in the VM and enable it in Options → QEMU Guest Agent; see Qemu-guest-agent in the Proxmox VE wiki. The user needs VM.GuestAgent.Audit on the VM (VM.Monitor on Proxmox VE 8).

The badge appears on VMs whose options enable the agent. It stays grey until Ping guest agent is on in Settings → Appearance; then cv4pve-vdi pings the agent of each running VM during a refresh (at most once a minute per VM, waiting half a second) and turns the badge green when the agent answers, red when it does not. The ping is one more API call per running VM, which is why it is off by default.

Containers have no guest agent: set the IP address in their services.

SPICE guest tools

SPICE carries more than the screen, if the VM is prepared for it:

Feature	In Proxmox VE	Inside the VM
Screen resize, clipboard	Display: SPICE or VirtIO-GPU	SPICE agent
Sound	Audio device with driver SPICE	-
USB devices of the client in the VM	USB device: Spice Port	-
Folder sharing	Options → Spice Enhancements: folder sharing	SPICE WebDAV daemon
Several monitors	Display: SPICE dual, three or four monitors (qxl2, qxl3, qxl4)	SPICE agent

The SPICE agent and the WebDAV daemon come with the SPICE guest tools for Windows and with the spice-vdagent and spice-webdavd packages on Linux; see SPICE in the Proxmox VE wiki and the SPICE download page.

cv4pve-vdi shows an audio badge on VMs whose audio device uses the SPICE driver and a USB badge on VMs with a USB port redirected to SPICE. They are read from the VM configuration, so they show what is set up, also while the VM is stopped.