Deploying Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with Open‐Source Platform for Higher Education

Summary

Currently, the application of science and technology to modernize study and research rooms in universities is a major challenge. The current situation shows that the facilities being provided for staff, lecturers, and students are not suitable for the rapid change in the outside world. In particular, the traditional Information Technology (IT) infrastructure provided to end users faces major problems, such as high cost, inflexibility, difficulty in maintenance, and limited ability to adapt to teaching majors. In this situation, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a virtualization solution that enables the provisioning of desktop operating system instances on one or more centralized servers in a data center. The VDI technology creates virtual desktops on a central server that can be accessed by remote users from any physical device over a local network or the Internet. However, most VDI deployments in large organizations are set up with large systems, such as the VMware Horizon View or Citrix XenDesktop. This leads to considerable costs for deploying the entire system. Currently, for many educational institutions, it is essential the need to deploy VDI on open‐source platform technologies to save costs and ensure flexibility in deployment. In this article, we present a VDI solution using open‐source virtualization and cloud‐computing platform. We used the Apache CloudStack cloud computing platform to set up a private cloud system and the RedHat Kernel‐based Virtualization Machine (KVM) virtualization platform to set up virtual servers and personal machines. This solution promises to eliminate the license cost of the hypervisor, thereby reducing the total cost per desktop. Furthermore, educational institutions can also save Microsoft's investment when using Linux.