Improving the Research Desktop Experience for OpenStack VDI

Integrating Hardware Accelerated Rendering and Remote Transport

Abstract

Using virtual machines with dedicated rendering and remote access capabilities, virtual workplaces for various usecases can be created, and then accessed from anywhere at any time. If this is to happen on a large scale in the cloud, so-called VDI for the dynamic provision of virtual desktops play an increasingly important role. A sustainable VDI should be freely available to everyone for modification and redistribution at no cost, be scalable, and should support various desktop use cases with different resource requirements. Some use cases involve hundreds of similar VM running in parallel, which requires proper resource planning.