VDI Rolling Review: Sun Microsystems' VDI 3
Posted by
Randy George
January 20, 2010
VDI lowers operating expenses while providing an extra dose of security--users can't install software, so a major attack vector is effectively closed down.
Citrix XenDesktop 3.0 brings a small technology advantage to our Rolling Review of virtual desktop infrastructure products.
Ericom's PowerTerm WebConnect makes a strong case for becoming a part of your VDI infrastructure.
Connection Broker 6.0 is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product designed for organizations that have standardized on VMware ESX and VirtualCenter.
MokaFive creates a portable virtual machine that can run independently on any laptop or PC.
Sun Microsystems' new and improved virtual desktop offering, VDI 3.0.
OnDemand Desktop provisions and deploys VMs fast, but has a few quirks, too.
Since this review ran, Oracle says it will use the Virtual Iron suite to complement Oracle VM, its own server virtualization software. We have included this article for historical purposes.
Since this review ran, VMware has revved View to version 4. We have included this article for historical purposes.
The players in our review ran the gamut from smaller vendors that primarily act as connection brokers to brand-name server virtualization players.
The architecture of Sun's VDI 3.0 comprises a back-end virtualization engine, which in this case can be VMWare's ESX or Sun's xVM VirtualBox hypervisor. Sun's VDI Core software sits on top of the hypervisor and contains all of the brokering and management logic. The final piece is the client access layer, which can be a thin client, a Microsoft Terminal Services Client (RDP), or Sun's Secure Web Access portal. Running VDI 3.0 means you have to embrace Solaris, because VDI Core and VirtualBox require 64-bit hardware running Solaris 10 Update 6. You can run Solaris on any 64-bit-ready x86 box, and if you're using ESX as your hypervisor, then you'll only have to worry about managing Solaris on the VDI Core box.
After installing VDI Core, we configured either ESX or VirtualBox to serve out virtual desktops. Once a provider is configured, desktop pools must be created to organize and distribute virtual desktops to clients. Like other systems we've tested, desktop pools can contain dynamic or static desktops. Dynamic desktops don't save changes or state information after logging out. Static desktops, in contrast, are permanently assigned to users and maintain all changes after logout. At the desktop pool level, we had no problems tying virtual desktop access to the Active Directory user accounts and groups in our test environment. VDI Core also can authenticate against LDAP databases.
VDI Core comes with a relatively basic set of performance management and provisioning features compared with other connection brokers, such as Sychron and Quest. This means IT can't prioritize connection requests based on the desktop pool -- one group of users may take server resources from another group. We'd also like to see more application awareness, load balancing and support for other hypervisors. On the plus side, VDI Core can be configured to automatically clone new virtual desktops in a given desktop pool based on increasing user demand and then spin them back down when demand drops.
Provisioning worked well in the lab. In particular, Sun VDI makes good use of a Microsoft tool called sysprep to avoid problems caused by cloning desktop images. Each computer, physical or virtual, that participates in a Windows domain must have a unique security identifier, or SID. If you clone a machine that's already joined to a Windows domain, each clone has the same SID and won't be allowed to log in to the domain. Sun lets you create a master image not joined to the domain and then works with sysprep, which changes the clone's SID and joins it to the domain automatically. Other players possess this capability, but Sun executes it very well.
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