About VDI

Features of VDI 3

Sun VDI 3.0 now includes the following features:

• Support for a wide variety of virtual desktop operating systems (XP, Vista, 2000, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu).
• Built-in virtualization (Sun xVM VirtualBox for VDI) or VMware Infrastructure.
• Integration with OpenSolaris and Sun Unified Storage Systems.
• Better support for VMware, allowing for larger deployments.
• Support for Active Directory.
• Users can have multiple virtual desktops and choose which one they want to access.
• Built-in support for RDP clients, meaning nearly any client device can connect directly to a Sun VDI Software server without installing any software on the client.
• Streamlined and simplified installation.

Architecture

Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure 3.0 (VDI) is made up of three main components layers - a virtualization platform, the Sun VDI Core, and a desktop access client.

Virtualization Platform
The basis for the architecture is the virtualization platform. In addition to creating and storing virtual machines the hypervisor provides the core functionality needed for virtual desktop management like starting, stopping, and snapshotting virtual machines. Sun VDI 3.0 supports the Sun xVM VirtualBox and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 virtualization platforms.

Sun VDI Core
The central component of the Sun VDI is the Sun VDI Core. The VDI Core provides all the functionality needed to build and manage large scale virtual machine deployments. In addition to its management capabilities, the VDI Core is also responsible for the brokering of virtual desktops on behalf of desktop access clients.

By integrating with Active Directory, the VDI Core is able to provide support for assignment of virtual desktops to existing users and groups within an organization. The VDI Core configuration data and runtime information is stored in a MySQL database which may be shared across multiple VDI Core instances on the network. This ensures access to the VDI Core even in failover scenarios.

Desktop Access
There are three distinct mechanisms supported for access to virtual desktops.

Sun Ray Thin Client Access - In this case, a custom Sun Ray Software Kiosk Session is initiated when a user inserts a token card into a Sun Ray thin client. This session uses the Sun VDI Core to request access to a virtual desktop on behalf of the user. Once a virtual desktop has been assigned to the user, a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the desktop is established for the session using the Sun Ray Windows Connector.

Secure Web Access with SGD - In this case, the browser is used to initiate a Sun Secure Global Desktop Software (SGD) session. SGD, in turn, uses the VDI Core's RDP redirection capability to establish a connection to an assigned virtual desktop.

RDP Client Access - (RDP redirection must be supported on the client side to use this mechanism). As with the previous case, the VDI Core's redirection capability is used to establish a connection to an assigned virtual desktop.