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Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.0
terminals in order to obtain a session with internet access. This has been the common practice since years. This year the
underlying technology is different as the participants get access to a variety of different desktops such as OpenSolaris 2009.06,
Windows 7 RC and Ubuntu 8.10.
During the whole conference week participants will own this selection of desktops. Each desktop is completely isolated and acts
as a Virtual PC. Every time the user inserts his card, he gets access to the same selection of desktops that has been assigned at
first use. Based on the card information participants will get also access to personalized information, such as their conference
schedule. So a level of customization is applied to each desktop. Participants are also able to switch between desktops.
In total the trade show group has to manage about 21000 desktops. This is a new dimension in virtual desktop management. It is
a challenge in terms or management of the sheer amount of desktops as well as handling the storage capacity needed to host
21000 virtual desktop images with an average amount of 10GB per individual image. This sums up to a total of 210 TB.
Sun VDI 3 actually uses a number of intelligent techniques to simplify the management. First of all Sun VDI 3 doesn't actually run
all the desktops in parallel. It only runs those desktops that are currently used by participants. As there are about 150 Sun Ray
terminals around the conference, there are only about 150-200 desktops in use at a time. The way this is organized is quite
simple. When a user inserts his conference badge and selects a certain desktop, the desktop is started or resumed from a previous
usage. When a user finally removes his card, the desktop(s) being in use are suspended, meaning they are stopped and their
current state is stored to disk. This behavior reduces the total requirement for CPU and memory quite dramatically.
A similar efficient approach is used on the storage side. Instead of creating 21000 full disk images in advance, Sun VDI 3 just
populates 3 desktops images fully on the storage side. One image per desktop type: OpenSolaris, Windows or Ubuntu. The images
are used as templates. Based on these templates there are a couple of thousand sparse desktop clones created for each template.
These clones reference their template and grow only when participants start using their desktops. This cloning technique is based
on capabilities of the Solaris filesystem ZFS and are exposed by the recently announced Unified Storage Systems. If you want to
find out more about the architecture of Sun VDI 3, you should start reading here.
Architecture
For the conference we have been using a relatively small setup compared to the number of desktops to be hosted, that focuses
on responsiveness of the desktops, sized for an upper limit of 400 to 500 hundred desktops running at the same time. As stated
above, we expect a load of 150-200 hundred desktops due to the limitation of having just 150 Sun Ray terminals.
The illustration above shows the general architecture. It misses just the terminals that are connected through a private
interconnect with the 3 VDI core servers, responsible for the session handling. Here we are using 3 x4600, each with 4 CPUs and
16GB memory. This is well enough for the session handling and virtual desktop management.
The virtualization layer is equipped with 5 x4450 servers, each 4 CPUs, 6 cores per CPU and 64MB of memory. These servers will
run VirtualBox hosting the virtual desktops. Each of these virtualization hosts will be able to handle about 100 desktops.
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