Remote Rendering and Rendering in Virtual Machines

The remote access of computers can be accomplished numerous ways. A common remote access method is secure shell (SSH). It is possible to use SSH to access graphical interfaces by using X11 forwarding. SSH, however, uses the computer that the user is accessing from, the client, as a means to process the graphical commands. This problem can be solved by using a program called VirtualGL. VirtualGL allows the rendering to happen on the host computer and utilizes the video card on that machine allowing for a smoother experience. Virtual machines are becoming increasingly common and do not have hardware graphics acceleration natively, however, there are several techniques available to allow a virtual machine access to a graphics card.