VMLab: A Desktop Virtualization Testbed for Research and Education

VMLab: A Desktop Virtualization Testbed

for Research and Education

Prasad Calyam, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator) [email protected] Alex Berryman (Student Research Assistant) [email protected]

Rohit Patali (Graduate Research Associate) [email protected]

Merit Desktop Virtualization Summit 1st _{December 2010}

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

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 Overview

•  OSC/OARnet VMLab – http://vmlab.oar.net

–  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

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

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 + 300 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

VMLab Software Components

•  VMware vSphere 4.5 (ESXi 4.5); View 4.5

–

•  vCenter, View Manager, View Composer, ThinApp, Active Directory, (vCloud Director)

•  Virtual Machines – Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux

•  Network Emulator – Netem on Linux Kernel 2.6.15

•  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

VMLab Project Web-portal

•  Project Website and Testbed Gateway - http://vmlab.oar.net

•  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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

VMLab Experiments

I. User Load Simulation

Cloud Experiments on NSF GENI Facility

•  Extend VMLab to a virtual desktop cloud with 3 data centers in

the NSF GENI Testbed Facility – http://www.geni.net

–  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

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

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 server-based 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)

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

Remote Instrumentation Proof-of-Concept

•  VMLab as a platform to evaluate technologies before transitioning

users into HPC and networking production environments

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