VMLab: A Desktop Virtualization Testbed for Research and Education

Transcription

1 VMLab: A Desktop Virtualization Testbed for Research and Education Prasad Calyam, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator) pcalyam@osc.edu Alex Berryman (Student Research Assistant) berryman@oar.net Rohit Patali (Graduate Research Associate) rpatali@oar.net Merit Desktop Virtualization Summit 1 st December 2010

2 Topics of Discussion VMLab Overview Hardware and Software Project Web-portal VMLab Use Cases Administrator Sandboxes User requests, VM environment and networking setup Classroom Labs User requests, VM environment and networking setup Research and Development VDBench Toolkit, NSF GENI Experiment VMLab Future Work 2

3 Topics of Discussion VMLab Overview Hardware and Software Project Web-portal VMLab Use Cases Administrator Sandboxes User requests, VM environment and networking setup Classroom Labs User requests, VM environment and networking setup Research and Development VDBench Toolkit, NSF GENI Experiment VMLab Future Work 3

4 VMLab Overview OSC/OARnet VMLab Proof-of-concept testbed for desktop virtualization experiments Established in June 2009 Sponsors Funding Sources: Ohio Board of Regents, VMware, Dell, National Science Foundation Hardware/Software Donations: IBM, VMware, HP, Wyse, Dell Used for various tabletop experiments over the last 8 months Research: Desktop Pools Management, Application Virtualization, Thin Client Protocols Evaluation, VDBench v0.1 Tool Development Classroom Labs: Moldflow for OSU ISE Dept., Remote Visualization w/gpu for OSU SAIC, Remote Instrumentation for YSU Chemistry Sandboxes: Many System Administrators (8 Ohio,1 Texas), Marketing Demos 4

5 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure VMware View is one of the popularly used VDI solutions Personalized user desktops, applications and data access while maintaining centralized control and security 5

6 VMLab Hardware Components IBM donation to VMLab 50+ desktop users can be supported 2 IBM HS22 Intel Blade Servers 2 Quad Core CPU s each, 32 GB of RAM each, 4 NIC s each 9 TB Shared SAS Storage GB Solid State Array Network Emulator Dual-NIC PC-router Thin Clients HP t5730, Dell FX100, WYSE C90, Teradici Zero State Client, Pano Logic Zero State Client, Wyse PocketCloud for iphone/ipad, Microsoft RDP, Open-source VNC 6

7 VMLab Software Components VMware vsphere 4.5 (ESXi 4.5); View 4.5 Windows Server 2003 vcenter, View Manager, View Composer, ThinApp, Active Directory, (vcloud Director) Virtual Machines Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux Network Emulator Netem on Linux Kernel User Applications Novice User: MS Word, Acrobat Reader, IE Browser Expert User: MS Word, Acrobat Reader, IE Browser, Windows Media, Flash Video, Matlab, MoldFlow, VLC Player, VolSuite 7

8 VMLab Project Web-portal Project Website and Testbed Gateway - Central site for information on VMLab testbed resources and capabilities Placeholder for study results, presentations and the virtual desktop performance benchmarking toolkit release (VDBench v0.1) Enables hands-on access to run your own remote desktop virtualization experiments in VMLab! 8

9 Topics of Discussion VMLab Overview Hardware and Software Project Web-portal VMLab Use Cases Administrator Sandboxes User requests, VM environment and networking setup Classroom Labs User requests, VM environment and networking setup Research and Development VDBench Toolkit, NSF GENI Experiment VMLab Future Work 9

10 Use Case: Administrator Sandboxes Users and their Requirements Central State University Install VMware technologies, Test configuration options The Ohio State University Web-portal VM staging, Electronic Lab Notebook Belmont Technical College Deploy and administer of Windows XP/7 Desktops Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine & Pharmacy Deploy and administer of Windows XP/7 Desktops, Video Streaming University of Findlay Install VMware technologies, Test configuration options Baldwin Wallace College Install VMware technologies, Test configuration options Bowling Green University Install VMware technologies, Test configuration options 10

11 VM Environment and Networking Setup Each Sandbox had a dedicated virtual network with separate blade, storage and firewall resources User meetings, requirements gathering, MOUs, Billing, VPN had to be setup for WAN connections Avoids having public IP address to all VMs PCoIP protocol client must be able to directly connect to virtual desktop with a public IP address or a VPN OpenVPN server was deployed with pfsense on a VM to accept VPN connections from any external IP address Virtual pfsense server also is a firewall appliance that we used to handle all traffic between the virtual desktops and the Internet Firewall rules were set/modified to block access to certain ports and addresses based on the VM requirements 11

12 Classroom Labs Users and their Requirements The Ohio State University, Dept. of Chemistry Electronic Lab Notebook for scientific instrument data management The Ohio State University, Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering Multiple Moldflow VMs Data sharing and folder permissions to enable faculty/student group access, content management Faculty distributed source files and documents by placing them in a write-protected network share mapped to Z: drive on each student VM Moldex3D VMs for student simulations The Ohio State University, Small Animal Imaging Center VolSuite/VolQuiz VMs that are used for surgical training of students 12

13 VolQuiz Remote Visualization Demo-I VMware View Manager does not have capabilities to directly interface with GPU hardware Evaluated solutions involving connection brokers and gatekeepers to help improve user accessibility and ease-of-use for remote visualization over wide-area networks Demo at 2009 Fall Internet2 Meeting, San Antonio 13

14 VolQuiz Remote Visualization Demo-II Evaluated integration of state-of-the-art thin client protocols such as PCoIP with encapsulation of custom VNC remote access solutions Demo at Summer 2010 Internet2/ESCC Joint Techs Conference, Columbus OH 14

15 Motivations for Research Recent advances in thin clients and the numerous benefits in transitioning user desktops to cloud environments Convenience, Cost savings, Green IT, Security, Need for system-aware, network-aware, human-aware frameworks and tools to deploy virtual desktop clouds Existing work focuses mainly upon system (i.e., CPU and memory) measurements for server-side resource adaptation Our focus is to couple client-and-server resource adaptation with measurements of network health and user experience Minimize cloud resource over-commitment Avoid guesswork in configuring thin client protocols Deliver optimum user experience of virtual applications 15

16 VMLab Experiments VDI Scalability Stress test VMs under various user application work loads User Applications: MS Excel, IE Browser, Windows Media Player, Matlab We used Autoit user application work loads (scripts for repeatable and automated GUI interactions with key presses, mouse movements) VDI Reliability Evaluate performance of remote desktop protocols Protocols Evaluated: Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), Teradici PC-over-IP (PCoIP), VNC Remote Frame Buffer Protocol (RFB) We used Netem for network (e.g., bandwidth, delay, loss) emulation 16

17 VDBench Toolkit and Testbed Setup 17

18 VDBench User Tasks Simulation 18

19 VMLab Experiments I. User Load Simulation III. User Pool Profiling II. Slow-motion Application Interaction Benchmarking 19

20 Cloud Experiments on NSF GENI Facility Extend VMLab to a virtual desktop cloud with 3 data centers in the NSF GENI Testbed Facility West, South & East US locations with L2/L3 network connectivity Install VMware ESXi, Other hypervisors, VDBench tools, Provision sandbox and desktop VMs within User slices For GENI experimenters, Classroom Labs, Internet users, VMs will host trial and open-source software for users OS (e.g., Windows 7, Ubuntu), Office Suite (e.g., Word, GIMP), Gaming Server (e.g., Counter Strike), Scientific computing (e.g., Matlab, Octave) Users generate synchronous and asynchronous loads Profile monitor and user VMs under various load conditions and investigate decision schemes for resource allocation Monitor VMs are instrumented to perform experiment runs User loads trigger performance data logging in monitor VMs 20

21 Anticipated Duration of Experiments Synthetic profiling experiments generally take 2 hrs for a load point, hence about 100 hrs (4 days) for a total run Real user profiling experiments might need atleast 14 days for a total run Total run time is the sampling duration of active VM usage that provides a baseline to develop a user profile snapshot Industry standard is 45 days Longer sampling periods help in better profiling We expect to have several experiment runs based on a variety of virtual desktop application use cases 21

22 Potential Research Questions What are trends of thin-client based user activities and their impact on resource consumption in virtual desktop pools? Is memory the most contended resource in virtual desktop clouds? (i.e., users will idle CPUs but keep their desktop applications open) What are the challenges in coupling network and human performance components in decision schemes? What are the trade-offs in client-based (e.g., VNC) versus serverbased thin client adaptation (e.g., RGS)? (i.e., thin client protocol consuming less resources is due to network bottleneck or light usage) How to build scalable testbeds that can support thin-client based virtual desktop staging experiments? How to develop effective VM benchmarking tools as well as synthetic load profiles that emulate real user loads? (i.e., characteristics of steady state, spikes/bursts, flash crowds) 22

23 Topics of Discussion VMLab Overview Hardware and Software Project Web-portal VMLab Use Cases Administrator Sandboxes User requests, VM environment and networking setup Classroom Labs User requests, VM environment and networking setup Research and Development VDBench Toolkit, NSF GENI Experiment VMLab Future Work 23

24 Remote Instrumentation Proof-of-Concept VMLab as a platform to evaluate technologies before transitioning users into HPC and networking production environments 24

25 VMLab Future Work Shared services based on VMware technologies to provide testbed access to USO user communities For institutions that lack resources to build similar testbeds Evaluate upcoming VMware View features, Windows 7 migration, etc. Persistent and Non-persistent desktops for testing amongst scientific user communities VMware related disaster data recovery service Community cloud pilot studies Cyber-security research, e.g., virtual machines to attract and analyze web-malware 25

26 Thank you for your attention!