Tips to Virtualize your desktop

BANGALORE, INDIA: To understand the need and usability of VDI, I'll start with an interesting setup I saw in early 2006. This deployment had nothing to do with VDI as VDI as a concept wasn't there. But they tried to get some functionality of VDI thorugh an innovative, though not so recommended, deployment. The organization I am talking about used to deal with animation and IP (Intellectual Property).

To do away with content theft or leakage, they thought of taking efficient security measures which involved limiting users' access rights; not permitting USB drives, Internet, and CDROMs, etc . Still, there was a probability that someone could actually take out the hard drive or use some such mechanism to take out data (like using a com port modem, etc). So, the IT team wanted to migrate all the machines to the server room, so that they could apply security features of the server room to the workstations.

However, the biggest question was how to give users access to their machines? They migrated all workstations to the server room and laid down the KVM (Keyboard, Video and Mouse) cable across the premises to connect them. This might sound funny, but it actually worked . The benefit was, the users didn't have any physical access to the workstations, and securing the workstations became easier as all were kept at a central location. But certain loopholes remained.

For example, KVM wires are not to be used for such long distances and might cause deterioration in video quality and latency in keyboard and mouse response. At the same time, even if the workstations were kept in a single location logically, they required to manage separate entities for the network independently, such as installing updates, installing new apps, etc.

The right solution for this is to have a setup where all desktops can be hosted in the data center, and logically there would be a single entity where you can just update a single image and take care of all workstations for an entire group. At the same time, one can also stream sessions on a network instead of doing it via KVM lines, and the user can access them using a low cost, low power consuming hosts from their desktop. And this is what Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is all about.

Types of VDI
The oldest form of VDI which we saw was Novel Net Ware remote boot servers, which used to remote boot Windows 3.11 over the network from a Novel Net ware server. This was followed by the not-so popular Remote Windows NT Remote Boot Services, which was used for booting Win 3.11 and Win 95 remotely. At that time, around 12 years back, we didn't call it VDI, even though the concept was more or less similar-managing and virtualizing desktops from the data center (or what we used to call it earlier: the server room).

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.

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.

You shall be asked for a user name and password. Type admin for both and you should be logged into the admin panel of OVD. Now, register your server here and make it the production server so that you can start hosting desktop sessions on it. For this, go to Servers Menu --> Unregistered Servers. Here, you should be able to see your server. Click on register and the server will disappear from this menu, and would be visible within the Server menu. Now click on 'Switch to production' option and the server shall be available to host sessions.

You can go to http://ip_address_of_OVD_Server/sessionmanager and be able see some test  users to login through. To create your own users, go to Configurations --> Profile Settings and select "I want to create my own users" radio button. Now go to the users menu and you should see the option to create new users. Here, just keep filling the user name, login name and password for users and you should be able to create as many users as possible. Once this is done, the next thing you have to do is assign applications to users. This will make sure the users/groups can only use the applications they are authorized to.

The easiest way to do this would be to create new application groups and align them with users which you have created. For this, go to Applications-> Publications Wizard. Here select the 'Create a group with users' radio button and you will see the list of users which you have just created. From here, select users who would have similar rights, or in other words will be in a single group, and hit Next. It will then ask you to give a name to the user group. Once done, it will ask you to either select an application group or to create a new application group. Please note that this is a newly installed machine and so you will not have any pre-created application group.

Create a new application group by selecting the first option which says, 'Create a group with applications.' Once you select this radio button, you will see all available applications on the system. Select apps which you want to allow for the current user group and press Next. In the next screen, it will ask you to give a name to the application group. Give an appropriate name and proceed. In the next screen it will ask you to confirm the activity. Now you can go to any machine in the same network and access http://ip_address_ of_OVD_Server/sessionmanager. Here you shall see a list of all users that you have created. Select the user you want to log into the network with and type its password.

Now you should be able to see a nice desktop with applications which you have authorized to this user.

Getting the Windows touch
As you have installed everything on a Linux box you should be seeing only Linux-based applications. However, you can get Windows apps directly on the same virtual desktop session along with Linux apps. Sounds exiting? Let's see how you can do it. All you have to do is to get a machine with Windows XP/200x installed, and applications which you want to distribute across the OVD should also be there. Now you have to download a client of OVD for Windows. You can get it from http://water2. ulteo.com /ovd/releases/windows/ovd-agent-latest.exe.

Once it has been downloaded, you can install it by clicking on the setup file. The only thing you have to do in this setup wizard is to give the IP address or FQDN of the machine where you have installed the setup file, and the session manager address of the OVD server, which is http://ip_address_of_OVD_Server/sessionmanager. Now follow the wizard till it ends and after that you should be able to see the Windows machine in the http:// ip_address_of_OVD_Server/sessionmanager/admin pages/ Servers --> Unregistered Servers section. Now register and make the machine production server, in exactly the same way as you did for the main OVD server (explained earlier).

Once that's done, while creating application groups or while running Publication wizard, you should be able to see applications installed on the Windows machine as well, and you should even be able to push these apps directly to the user sessions.