We decided to build one solution from scratch that fully adapts to our needs and lets us take control over all layers involved. We tuned network, storage, hypervisors performance and viewers, focusing in desktops templates quick deployment.
In this talk we will focus on the experience over the past years developing our own VDI system that brings virtualization at Escola del Treball in Barcelona with over 1k users and 2k desktops created. We had a low budget so we used gaming hardware and cheap second hand hardware that we had to optimize.
IsardVDI is an open source project that is currently deploying desktops quickly while using low cost servers and network infrastructure. We had to optimize that hardware, from storage IOPS to real time UI events, while keeping in mind network traffic and system reliability.
We use NVME to do write-cache, 10 Gbps copper networks, gaming mainboards, mainstream processors, raspberry pi and old computers as thin clients. We built NAS in cluster systems with pacemaker and drbd, incremental qcows disk storage to lower storage footprint. Hypervisor statistics about use and resource consumption brings orquestration oriented to desktop performance.
IsardVDI can be quickly deployed with docker containers. Some of the technologies used are Libvirt, Spice, EnhanceIO, Pacemaker, DRBD, Python3,
WebSockets, RethinkDB, ...
