Uma avaliação experimental do uso de desktops virtuais

Abstract

A server cluster connected to the Internet can support virtual desktops in a virtual computing environment. Each user can have his/her own virtual desktop, accessed through the Internet by means of devices such as laptop, PC, notebook, tablet or smartphone. The benefits of desktop virtualization include the possibility of improving utilization of computational resources such as processor, memory, disk and network; a more efficient management; centralized backup, and remote accessibility independently on the user location. Education institutions have traditionally used local desktops for use of faculty, administrative and technical staffs, as well as for their students. Managing these desktops requires a technical staff to take care of installation, configuration, updating and maintaining in a personalized manner, according to each user profile. In this manner, administration is costly and inefficient. Several companies increasingly adopted virtual desktops delivered by an infrastructure of centralized servers, while education institutions are late in this process. The diversity of applications used by different areas of teaching create demand for studies to better understand the performance of virtual desktop infrastructure. The purpose of this study is to evaluate virtual desktop infrastructure from the perspective of user quality of experience. To accomplish this, a virtual desktop infrastructure have been deployed at UFSCAR, and a set of experiments were carried out at our labs employing five different applications. To evaluate the influence of the networking quality of service on the user experience, we produced 5 scenarios with different communication latencies. Finally, we also executed experiments to evaluate the demand for computational resources (e.g., processor, memory, I/O, and network) as more virtual desktops are spawned. This experiment can provide important information for future capacity planning.