Low cost computing using virtualization for Remote Desktop

The goal of this project is to provide a low cost open source Remote Desktop based computing environment to users by using Virtualization Technology and existing open source software and tools. In this project, we have used LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) [1] to access Remote Desktop and Xen [2] hypervisor to provide virtual desktop environment at server. A user gets a personalized desktop in the form of a VM (Virtual Machine) running over remote server. It is different from the old Remote Desktop solutions in a way that instead of a login session on single OS remote server, user will get a full fledged desktop with desired OS. The most important benefit for the system will be the resource conservation as facilities like live VM migration [3] available with virtualization will help in Load Consolidation and Load Balancing. Because of virtualization, user's desktop is also isolated from other users in the same physical machine. This project makes use of open source tools like LTSP and XEN to make the solution affordable to everybody. There are certain similar solutions available in market like Citrix Xen Desktop [4], VM Ware View [5] but because of their proprietary nature they are both costly and closed systems.