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Low Cost Computing Using Virtualization For

Remote Desktop
Dhaval Manvar, Mayank Mishra, Anirudha Sahoo
Computer Science And Engineering Department,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Email: [manvardhaval, mayank, sahoo]@cse.iitb.ac.in

Abstract—The goal of this project is to provide a low cost multiple users logged in to it remotely. Thus the users share
open source Remote Desktop based computing environment to the resources and it turns out to be a more efficient and
users by using Virtualization Technology and existing open source cost-effective computing solution. But there are some other
software and tools. In this project, we have used LTSP (Linux
Terminal Server Project) [1] to access Remote Desktop and Xen problems present in this Remote Desktop scenario.
[2] hypervisor to provide virtual desktop environment at server. • Sharing of the operating system instance among multiple
A user gets a personalized desktop in the form of a VM (Virtual users: One user can cause others to suffer. For example,
Machine) running over remote server. It is different from the old a misbehaving application can consume most of the
Remote Desktop solutions in a way that instead of a login session
on single OS remote server, user will get a full fledged desktop resources of the system.
with desired OS. The most important benefit for the system will • Imbalance in loads of different remote servers: There
be the resource conservation as facilities like live VM migration are no load balancing/consolidation schemes available in
[3] available with virtualization will help in Load Consolidation such solutions.
and Load Balancing. Because of virtualization, user’s desktop • Users only get a session on the remote server rather than
is also isolated from other users in the same physical machine.
This project makes use of open source tools like LTSP and XEN a personalized Desktop.
to make the solution affordable to everybody. There are certain One natural extension of this Remote Desktop scenario, which
similar solutions available in market like Citrix Xen Desktop [4], solves some of the above mentioned problems, is the use
VM Ware View [5] but because of their proprietary nature they of remote Virtual Machines which has been employed in
are both costly and closed systems.
our project. Capability of live migration available with vir-
I. I NTRODUCTION tual machines provides facilities of dynamically load bal-
ance/consolidate server loads. The same capability can be used
The complexity of software and their demand of computing to provide an efficient Remote Desktop service to the users.
power is an ever increasing phenomenon. This, coupled with Every user can own remote virtual machine which executes
improvements in processor chip making, has resulted in a on a remote server and is accessed by a thin client. Thus,
very rapid increase in the computational power/capacity of the the user gets the experience of a desktop and a personal
hardware. The desktops/laptops used by the users nowadays machine which is as good as a local desktop. Although, there
have a powerful hardware which may be over-kill for an are some proprietary products already available in the market,
average user. These powerful machines become obsolete very we believe that our scheme will be much more cost effective
soon and hence are required to be replaced with more powerful and easily employable by small enterprise and educational
machines. The major reason behind this is not the lack of institutes. Our project is based on open source software and
processing capacity of the hardware but the service support hence can serve as a platform for future improvements and
and compatibility with newer Operating Systems and software. development.
This results in unnecessary wastage of resources and in turn
increases the cost required for the operation of an enterprise. II. S YSTEM D ETAILS
One solution to reduce the cost and resources required by In this project, Xen hypervisor is used to provide virtual-
individual user is to provide them with the facility of Remote ization environment in the server and LTSP is used to access
Desktop. Users no longer work on a powerful, much-more- Remote Desktop. Users can access their desktop from any thin
than-required hardware but share a remote powerful machine client in the local network. We have made changes in LTSP
using light weight thin clients. The configuration required for software and have added scripts which are used for user to VM
thin client is very low as they run stripped down version mapping. The setup has two core components: Management
of OS or a light kernel. This results in extensive saving Server and Virtualization Aware Physical Machine (VAPM) as
in cost and time required for maintenance/upgrades as only shown in the Figure 1. Management Server is the central entity
the server is required to be upgraded or replaced. In current whose main task is to perform user to VM mapping, create
Remote Desktop solutions, there is one instance of operating VM on one of the existing VAPMs and provision resources to
system running over a powerful remote server which supports user’s virtual desktop (running as VM) as per requirements.
978-1-4673-0298-2/12/$31.00
c 2012 IEEE Xen hypervisor is installed on VAPM which runs user’s virtual
TABLE I
desktop. We have also developed scripts which are used to C OMPARISON OF LTSP W ITH R EMOTE ACCESS M ECHANISMS
communicate control messages among different components
of this project. VNC OpenThinClient LTSP
The aim of this project is to provide basic functionalities Open Source Yes Yes Yes
for Remote Desktop, like desktop accessible from any thin USB Support At No Yes Yes
client, user accessing devices attached to thin client’s USB Client
port etc, using virtualization. We assume that user will use Audio Support No Yes Yes
At Client
thin client without local hard disk. We also assume that user
Allows Local Ex- No Yes Yes
does not use high definition graphics applications. We have ecution of Appli-
only considered Linux Operating System as Remote Virtual cation
Desktop but we can use Microsoft Windows Operating System GUI Export RFB(Remote SSH-X XDMCP
as Remote Desktop by using RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) FrameBuffer)
with small changes in this implementation. Software Depen- No Yes (Java Vir- No
dencies tual Machine)
III. C HOICES F OR VARIOUS C OMPONENTS
1) Xen Vs KVM [6]: Xen is an open source hyper-
visor. Xen supports para-virtualization [2] as well as
Hardware-assisted virtualization [7] while KVM only
supports Hardware-assisted virtualization. So KVM can
only run on specific processors (AMDV and Intel VTx
processors [8]).
2) LTSP for Remote Desktop Access: LTSP is an
efficient Remote Desktop access mechanism for Linux.
It does not require any local software or OS to boot
user’s desktop running on remote server. It requires only
a PXE (Pre eXecute Environment) [9] enabled network
interface card which is available in most of the thin
clients and PCs. Comparison of LTSP with other Remote
access mechanisms is given in Table I.
Fig. 1. Solution Approach for Remote Virtual Desktops
IV. M AJOR C HALLENGES
1) User To VM Mapping: Since user can use any thin devices. We don’t have a Load Balancing and Consolidation
client, it becomes important to map user to his/her scheme in place. We are in the process of achieving this using
desktop VM on the basis of user credentials. This a Vector Based resource management approach discussed in
required changes to be made in LTSP scripts. [10].
2) Starting VM On User Log in: As soon as user logs in,
the VM has to be identified and started. The VM state R EFERENCES
is also required to be stored when the user logs off. [1] “Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP),” http://www.ltsp.org.
3) Provisioning of VM to Host Virtual Desktop: Ap- [2] P. Barham et al., “Xen and the art of virtualization,” in Proceedings of
proximating the resource requirement of the user is a the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles. ACM,
2003, pp. 164–177.
difficult task. This approximation is based on historical [3] C. Clark et al., “Live migration of virtual machines,” in Proceedings
usage records of the user. of the 2nd conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design &
4) Enhancing System Efficiency: To improve system ef- Implementation-Volume 2. USENIX Association, 2005, pp. 273–286.
[4] “Citrix XenDesktop,” http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/
ficiency, dynamic load balancing and consolidation are feature.asp?contentID=2300341.
required. [5] “Vmware view,” http://www.vmware.com/products/view/overview.html.
[6] A. Kivity et al., “kvm: the linux virtual machine monitor,” in Proceed-
ings of the Linux Symposium, vol. 1, 2007, pp. 225–230.
V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK [7] K. Adams and O. Agesen, “A comparison of software and hardware
The project provides a Virtualization based Remote Desktop techniques for x86 virtualization,” in Proceedings of the 12th interna-
tional conference on Architectural support for programming languages
solution using open source tools. The use of virtualization and operating systems. ACM, 2006, pp. 2–13.
leads to efficient resource utilization and makes management [8] “x86 Virtualization,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 virtualization.
easy. We expect this project to serve as a solution for the [9] “Preboot Execution Environment (PXE),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Preboot Execution Environment.
frequent upgradation problem of the end user computing [10] M. Mishra and A. Sahoo, “On theory of vm placement: Anomalies in
infrastructure. existing methodologies and their mitigation using a novel vector based
Currently the Virtual Remote Desktop is accessible using approach,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud
Computing. IEEE, 2011, pp. 275–282.
LTSP, we are working to make it accessible using web browser.
This will make Remote Desktop accessible on variety of other

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