[gPXE] Can gPXE's network booting be classified as a VDI solution ?

[Nick Couchman]

>>> On 2010/09/02 at 17:11, The Mad One <biker6202002 at yahoo.fr> wrote: 
> Hello to everyone,
> 
> I'm working on my ACS thesis & I'm stuck on how to classify gPXE's network 
> booting in the way it is used by a solution like DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot 
> in Linux).
> 
> I know it's a sort of "OS streaming" solution, but can OS streaming be 
> classified as a VDI solution ? 
> [because in some manner it is virtualizing the hard drive of the desktop 
> computer, but the OS  is running on bare metal (on that desktop computer) not 
> in a VM]
> 
> VDI= Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
> 
> Please, help me solve this dilemma.
> 

Short answer: no, gPXE network boot is not a VDI solution.

Long answer: gPXE can certainly be part of a VDI solution, but simply be able to boot off a network - either to a PXE server or a SAN volume - does not, in itself, make a VDI solution.  First, VDI, as VMware has popularized the term, refers to running the O/S on a cluster of servers in your datacenter and using remote desktop technologies (RDP, Citrix, NoMachine, VNC, etc.) to access those desktop machines from a thin client.  I believe that this is the more accepted definition of VDI.  It is certainly possible to use gPXE to create a VDI solution.  For example, you can boot via PXE a slimmed down version of Linux that has no purpose except to connect to remote systems.  There are several Linux distributions out there that support this - LTSP is one of the more popular and common ones.  gPXE's ability to boot a SAN volume - iSCSI or AOE - offers another possibility: instead of booting an O/S via PXE, which, depending on the O/S and the needed configuration can be a challenge, you can boot as if the SAN volume was a locally attached hard disk.  This is the O/S streaming you're talking about (Citrix XenDesktop has made this pretty popular), but it could be part of a VDI solution.  If that iSCSI or AOE volume happens to contain a thin operating system, then perhaps it is part of a VDI solution.

The bottom line is that gPXE and booting off the network is not a VDI solution.  However, there are plenty of VDI solutions and O/S streaming solutions that could use this as a base.

I actually had an idea a few months back for an O/S streaming solution using gPXE for booting, OpenSolaris (ha, I guess that'll be Solaris Express, now) for storage, and several different O/S options for desktop streaming.  With ZFS on OpenSolaris and the ability to use deduplication, volume and FS management, and the COMSTAR storage target management system that is part of Solaris, you could build a pretty efficient storage backend that would allow you have several [hundred/thousand] desktop images stored on a decently small amount of storage, and present those images as iSCSI targets via COMSTAR.  You could then use gPXE on desktop systems to contact that iSCSI target and boot remotely.  I hadn't worked out all of the details about how to accomplish it, how to make administration easy, etc., but it's a start.  If I ever get free time, I'll probably work more on it, though, with the recent announcement about the death of OpenSolaris, I'm at the mercy of Oracle to release Solaris Express 11 before ZFS deduplication becomes a workable solution.  Anyway, I'm getting off-topic here, so enough of that.

-Nick




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