“ VMLab ” Testbed for Desktop Virtualization Experiments

1. Prasad Calyam1,2,3, Alex Berryman 2,3, Albert Lai3, Jayshree Ramanathan3, Matthew Honigford4 Ohio Supercomputer Center1, OARnet2, The Ohio State University3, VMware4 Point-of-contact: pcalyam@osc.eduOctober 2012 Virtual Classroom Lab Pilot VDPilot: Feasibility study of hosting virtual desktops for classroom labs within a federated university system in Ohio Project Overview Goal: Support desktop virtualization experiments for research and education user communities Major Efforts: Desktop virtualization sandboxes for system administrators and educators R&D activities relating to VDC resource allocation and thin-client performance benchmarking Virtual desktops for classroom lab user trials involving faculty and students Evaluation of the feasibility to deploy computationally intensive interactive applications (e.g., remote volume visualization) in virtual desktops Educational laboratory course curriculum development involving desktop virtualization exercises Subjective Testing Manuals Testing Survey Form VDBench Objective Testing “VMLab” Testbed for Desktop Virtualization Experiments • R&D Motivations • Need for Human, Network and Application awareness in cloud platforms to support large user workloads • “A Cloud Service Provider can provision adequate CPU and memory resources to a VD in the cloud, but if the thin-client protocol configuration does not account for network health degradations and application context, the VD will be unusable for the user.” • “There is a need for frameworks and tools that can estimate how many concurrent VD requests can be handled on a given set of system and network resources at a data center such that resource utilization is maximized, and at worst, the minimum user QoE is guaranteed as negotiated in service level agreements (SLAs)” GENI Experimentation with OnTimeMeasure, OpenFlowand VDI GEC10 Demo GEC14 Demo • Resources @ http://vmlab.oar.net • Website acts as a project website and testbed gateway • IBM BladeCenter S Chassis that acts as a data center which can concurrently support up to ~50 VDs • 2 IBM HS22 Intel blade servers, 2 quad-core CPU’s each, 32 GB of RAM each, and 4 NICs each • VMware VDI, VMware View, VMware Horizon Virtual Desktops for HPC Applications • Computationally-intensive visualization applications in science-and-engineering are remotely accessible to users via thin-clients in VMLab • Benefits: improves user convenience, enables shared resources, fosters user mobility, … • Health Application: (funded by NIH) Remote Interactive Volume Visualization Infrastructure for Researchers (RIVVIR) being developed for The Ohio State University Medical Center to support Small Animal Imaging Center Shared Resource (SAISR) users – VMLab is helping in improving usability experiments • Manufacturing Application: (funded by NIST) Moldex3D demo application is being used by Polymer Ohio to educate local industry professionals on how to use HPC environments to discover more efficient injection molding techniques – VMLabis helping in staging/feasibility experiments Health Application *NSF Award Number CNS-1205658: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. CNS-1205658, VMware and Dell. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of VMware, Dell or the National Science Foundation. Manufacturing Application