There are some threads on this forum which suggest to use serial instead of VNC for VMs. Is there much of a performance gain in not attaching a graphics card to the VM?
If it’s a Linux or other “unixy” guest OS then serial has the great advantage that you can copy & paste.
Since we are gonna be using SSH for normal usage, copy paste is not a big issue, nah?
As long as SSH works …
Any type of console is only necessary for
- installation
- troubleshooting when regular remote access methods (SSH or RDP) fail for some reason
- single user mode
Kind regards
Patrick
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it depends a bit on what you’re using the VM for.
If your virtual machine doesn’t need a graphical interface (like you’re running a server, doing CLI-based work, or just need remote shell access), then using serial instead of VNC can definitely make things lighter. It cuts down on the overhead that comes with initializing and running a virtual GPU and graphical output.
That said, the performance gain isn’t massive in most cases — we’re talking about freeing up a small bit of CPU and memory. But if you’re running multiple VMs or have limited resources, every bit helps.
In short:
- For headless or server-style VMs, go with serial — it’s cleaner and faster.
- For desktop environments or anything GUI-based, stick with VNC (or SPICE) since you’ll need a display anyway.
So yeah, unless you actually need the graphics output, running without VNC (just serial) is usually the smarter and more efficient option.
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If you have SSH on a LInux system, you can use X2go.
It creates a virtual X session over ethernet and SSH.
It has WIndows, LInux and Mac clients too.
And for me so far it always worked out of the box after I set up SSH.