For those who don't understand remote booting or disk-less booting, it's basically booting a machine from the network without a hard drive. At the client level, we used to have machines with drive but with full-fledged processors and RAM, and the processing used to happen at the client level. So, you can't exactly call it a VDI. In a true VDI setup, the processing should also happen from the data-center. Then there were other similar offerings.

A very famous one from the open source world being LTSP. Some people treat it as a VDI, as VDI isn't strictly defined yet. The other technology which helped in building the VDI concept was the 'Terminal Services'. Here, the complete processing happens at the server end, and the client only streams the KVM over the network. But here the problem was, you could only stream Windows 2000 data from a Windows 2000 box. So, you needed separate machines for separate OSes and this feature was only available on server class OSes.

Technically there was no way to run terminal services on desktop OSs and stream them to the thin client. Here, thin clients are a bit different from clients for the remote boot services. Of course, thedisk was missing, but at the same time it also had a low end processor and some amount of RAM which could only boot the machine with its embedded OS and start the client's terminal services. Few similar offerings such as VNC, RDP, etc. were also there.

However, these offerings were not able to stream different OSes from the same terminal server, so people started hosting different virtual machines on a single powerful server to run terminal services on it. This added a lot of overhead to the servers, and since multiple virtual machines were running the Terminal Services, the management became difficult. This is where true VDI solutions came into picture.

These solutions mainly encompass most of the above mentioned technologies such as Terminal Services, Thin Clients, Virtualization, but are specialized to provide a VDI . Here, we look at one such solution, and in subsequent months shall discuss more.

Once you select Publication wizard, you will be able to see all applications, both in Windows and Linux servers.

Open Virtual Desktop
This virtual desktop has some really useful features as compared to other similar products. The first is the ability to stream both Windows and Linux applications on the client desktop simultaneously. The other is the comprehensive management interface. We talk about all this and show how you can install it.

Installing Open Virtual Desktop
We have provided the ISO in the PCQ Xtreme DVD with this issue. Alternately, you can download the installation ISO from http:// tinyurl.com/nafdv5. It's not a huge file and so would not take much time to download. Once done, you can burn the ISO on a DVD and boot your system using it. The installation is similar to a standard Ubuntu install and there is nothing much to do.

At the beginning of the installation, it offers three choices. Select the first, which says, 'Install Ulteo SM and ApS and press Enter.' This shall install all components of Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) to your server. We recommend you use a server with at least 2GB RAM and one of the latest multi-core processors. Once the installation is over, check if the machine has got an IP from your DHCP or not. Next, go to one of the other machines on the same network and open http://ip_address_of_OVD_ Server/ session manager/ admin.