Ravada: Free, easy-to-use and deploy VDI solution
ravada.upc.edu
ravada.upc.edu
There’s almost always a problem with capacity planning, especially around peak usage, that almost always results in a shitty experience for the end user. VDI gets touted as a cost saving solution but whatever you save on hardware you get back tenfold in frustrated users and support needs. And you still need to administer and maintain the end user terminals anyway which isn’t significantly less time consuming than a fleet of standardised workstations.
As a consumer, it’s always terrible. Performance is disappointing, anything graphical is a nightmare. If the network is down or congested you can’t work, despite the fact that all you need to do is edit a Word doc.
At a newspaper I worked at we ended up with VDI for most folks but editors had both VDI and a local workstation. Some software could only be accessed in one environment and not the other, so there was a whole dance you had to do to move work across too. It was a nightmare and costs were ridiculous since we ended up managing two environments anyway.
I’m sure VDI can be done well in some environments. I’ve just never seen it be better, cheaper and with less maintenance and support burden than a managed fleet of workstations/laptops.
It's not cheap, but it is convenient.
The connection uses PCoIP, which may have something to do with the user experience, and of course AWS can handle the peak loads
If I have to have a virtual Windows desktop class machine, just give me a real ec2 instance with at least 16GB of RAM, 8+ virtual CPUs, and provisioned IOPS EBS for storage. And let me keep it shut down as much as possible.
Although if you're giving me a machine of that level of performance, how about putting a Linux AMI on there instead?
Though it did feel peverse that most work was done in webapps. Chromebooks probably would have been better!
Fired up task manager. Ah yes, 32Gb EC2 instance with 30 active users on it, all of whom had 10 Chrome tabs open. The memory was flat out, the IO was flat out and the CPU was flat out. Explained as politely as I could that they were doing everything entirely wrong and had been sold a complete lie by their IT director and MSP.
But they ticked a compliance box by not logging in from their laptops.
This is realistically where VDI seems to end up. I have seen it too many times to actually believe there is a competent use out there. It's a lie to patch up the fact that there isn't a half decent security and patching model for desktop computing and you don't trust your staff.
I agree with what you say about capacity planning and dual environments. VDI to me has this feeling of trying to have one foot in legacy and one foot in the future and it doesn't really work. Chromebooks + thin apps work much better as a sort of "thin client" solution when executed well.
> Apache Guacamole is a [...] remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.
> [O]nce Guacamole is installed on a server, all you need to access your desktops is a web browser.