Using SPICE with TrueNAS Scale Cobia (23.10)

TrueNAS Scale Cobia (23.10) disabled the option to access VM displays via VNC. The connection method is changed to SPICE.

There are many different clients, which support Spice. Under Debian the tool Remmina is available that is a GTK-based remote desktop client. This tool supports many different protocols: RDP, VNC, SPICE, X2Go, SSH, etc. Some of the protocols, i.e. SPICE, are only available via additional plugins.

To install Remina with the SPICE plugin (the RDP and VNC plugins are installed by default):

sudo apt install remmina remmina-plugin-spice

When Remina is installed, you can connect to the server via the SPICE protocol:

remmina spice://server.example.org

If multiple VMs are running the different ports can be found in the details of the display device.

Tip

If a VM was created before version 23.10 the display of the VM must be deleted and newly created. Since version 23.10 only the SPICE protocol is available and password, which protects the connection, must be set.

Sometimes the VM must use UEFI in order to work properly with the SPICE protocol.