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Open Source VDI solution with RHEV and oVirt

Production Line Desktop

Article from ADMIN 16/2013

By Peter Stöckl

Red Hat introduces a management system for KVM-based virtualization based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and open source project oVirt. Now, solutions for desktop virtualization can be implemented without using proprietary software.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) KVM management platform offers a cost-effective and stable alternative to building a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution. RHEV is originally based on a development by KVM specialist Qumranet. In 2008, Red Hat acquired the company and ported the software step by step from C# and .NET to Java. RHEV's current version 3.2 has been available since June 2012.

If you can manage without support from Red Hat, you can turn to the Red Hat-initiated open source oVirt project. This project is a starting point for Red Hat's RHEV product. However for business purposes, you will not want to use it in a production environment because of the lack of oVirt support as a VDI platform. Red Hat offers a 60-day trial subscription with support, installation instructions, and extensive documentation for testing the RHEV platform [1].

Architecture

A typical RHEV VDI environment (Figure 1) consists of the RHEV-M management server and one or more KVM-based RHEV-H hypervisor hosts. The RHEV Manager coordinates the RHEV-H server workloads; manages the VDI configuration, templates, and desktop pools; and takes care of automatically rolling out and deleting virtual machines. The RHEV Manager includes a JBoss application server with the RHEV engine and an SDK written in Python and Java. The available web applications include the administrator portal for administrators and the user portal for users, as well as a reporting engine. Since RHEV 3.2, RHEV and oVirt have offered a framework for the integration of third-party components directly in the RHEV Manager (Table 1).

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