The libvirt library is a Linux API over the virtualization capabilities of Linux that supports a variety of hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, as well as QEMU and some virtualization products for other operating systems. This article explores libvirt, its use, and its architecture.
Ok – so i’ve got a farm of physical servers all set up with minimal linux installs. And i’ve got a bunch of users outside wanting to use virtual desktops.
How do i do this? i’ll need some kind of router or arbitrator/broker for connection attempts from remote clients. what is this in linux world?
and the physical servers – do they run general purpose linux distributions or are there minimal distributions geared to running VMs only – I don’t need sound or printing or such like on a “thin” hypervisor distro.
i’d be interested – I only see desktop oriented VM features for linux.
For remote desktop type functionality, meaning graphical timesharing, look at NoMachine NX. I have had good experiences with it in simpler setups. I have no experience with their connection broker, but they seem to have one for multiserver installations.
If I was trying to publish virtualized desktops (ie, one desktop OS instance per user), I would probably look at VMware’s solution first, but that’s mainly because I have a good opinion of ESX server.
Why do you need VMs? If you use linux base systems, there’s really not much of a point to using VMs for linux desktops. (Well there can be good reasons, but nothing you’ve mentioned would indicated you need to go the VM route)
Just install the desktop software on the linux systems, and then users can start remote X11 sessions. If they’re outside of your LAN or on windows boxes, set up the machines with NXservers and run the X11 sessions through that. There is FreeNX which is a FOSS version of the NXserver. The NXclient is free and can connect to FreeNX.