Open Stack

This sounds super interesting. While not a VDI user, I can see a huge appeal.

Maybe this might be an interesting topic for OpenInfra Live?
https://openinfra.dev/live/

On Wed, Jun 1, 2022 at 4:14 PM Andy Botting <andy at andybotting.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Radosław,
>
> > I am wondering if and how OpenStackers are approaching the subject of
> > VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), also nowadays commonly called
> > DaaS (Desktop as a Service) offering.
> > To be more specific, I am looking forward to a solution covering both
> > Linux and Windows desktops, pre-OS screen access optional,
> > well-integrated (i.e., having automation) with OpenStack Nova,
> > preferably also with Cinder and Glance, optionally with Keystone
> > (apart from self-auth of course!) and Heat, 3D acceleration optional
> > (most of the desktops here don't need it), nice to have read-only
> > sharing of screen.
>
> We just launched a service like this on the Nectar Research Cloud.
> Like you, I looked around but couldn't find any Open Source projects
> that would be suitable.
>
> In the end, we based ours on a project from the University of
> Melbourne that did initially support Windows, but we removed some of
> that support to simplify our codebase as we didn't need it.
>
> We called it Bumblebee, and the code is here:
> https://github.com/NeCTAR-RC/bumblebee
>
> It's a Django web app with a Redis-based task scheduler that launches
> Nova instances, booted from a Cinder volume, cloned from a base OS
> image.
>
> The Django app directly modifies Guacamole's database to create the
> connections once the OpenStack resources have been provisioned and
> provides the user with a link that takes them to their desktop.
>
> We used Keycloak with OIDC for authentication on the web app and
> Guacamole and it's fairly seamless transitioning between the two.
>
> We did initially look at using Heat, but we wanted to support a
> workflow of being able to destroy the VM and archive the OS image to
> Swift (and restore again later if needed) so it was easier to just
> manage the resources directly.
>
> There's no 3D acceleration in our solution yet, but we're planning on
> looking at things like virtual GPUs later on.
>
> Sadly, I'm not going to make it to Berlin either, but I was thinking
> it might make for a good talk at the next summit.
>
> I'm in the process of properly documenting it now, so I don't have
> much to share at this point, but I'm happy to go into more detail
> about anything.
>
> cheers,
> Andy
>