Nova currently provides support for VNC and SPICE graphical consoles. VNC in particular is the protocol employed natively by most popular hypervisors supported by Nova. Microsoft Hyper-V in this context is a remarkable exception, as it employs the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for graphical console access, based on Open Specifications and implemented by various open source projects.

Here's an example video showing an HTML5 RDP console based on FreeRDP.

RDP console configuration is quite straightforward. All you need to do is to add the following configuration settings in your Hyper-V compute node's nova.conf:

  [rdp]
  enabled=True
  html5proxy_base_url=http://192.168.209.135:8888/

Where the url specified in the html5proxy_base_url setting is provided by the FreeRDP HTML5 proxy as detailed in the next section.

The FreeRDP HTML5 proxy can be installed on various Linux distributions (currently Ubuntu >= 12.04, RHEL 6.x / CentOS 6.x and Fedora >= 16) or on Microsoft Windows, including also Hyper-V Server.

A shell script is provided to simplify the installation procedure of the application and the dependencies, mostly available in source form only.

  sudo apt-get install -y git
  git clone https://github.com/cloudbase/FreeRDP-WebConnect.git
  cd FreeRDP-WebConnect
  
  sudo ./nstall_prereqs.sh
  ./setup_all.sh