Check-list: what is VDI or how to distinguish a real product from “import-substituted” crafts

Background

Together with colleagues from Virtuozzo (after the sale of a part of the business and Odin brand of Ingram Micro company, we called the Parallels division, which deals with virtualization), we developed a product for desktop virtualization - Parallels VDI from IBS. Plus, we have a wealth of experience in implementing projects to consolidate workplaces using Citrix and VMware solutions. In general, we have seen, perhaps, everything that is going on “under the hood” of VDI solutions - we know well how they should be arranged and how they differ from simple virtualization. Therefore, when we meet a solution in which the implementation of VDI is declared, and in fact it turns out that the developer understands to the best of his integrity and honesty just connecting to a virtual machine using some desktop delivery protocol, we feel sad.

What does the developer need? Keep the doors open for a potential government order, and for this it is necessary to comply with the requirements of FZ-188 in order to enter the register of the RF Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications . At the same time, there are no technical requirements to which the product must meet in a specific category of the registry. As a result, for the sake of getting into it, negligent developers can write that their product can do anything.

For this reason, now in the registry come across sometimes quite exotic crafts. Including in our native category "Virtualization", including this for workplaces. Assembling a bunch of packages of different Linux projects like DRBD, GFS, KVM / qemu, pacemaker and redhat-cluster (rebuilding it into a DEB package using Alien) can now be called a “virtualization platform”. Technically, virtual machines start, even a cluster of two or three nodes can be assembled. But how to go with this on a dozen servers, and especially dozens of racks?
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Naturally, the customer can not hold an expertise on all technologies, therefore, now we are often called to talk about how the name of the box corresponds to its content. Of these mini-projects, we began to appear quite wonderful checklists, which, as it turned out, are in great demand. We decided not to hide this secret knowledge, and we will publish some of them. In this post, we give the minimum hygienic set of requirements, which, in our opinion, must meet the decision, rightfully claim to the title of VDI.

We welcome your comments. Suggest new items to add to the checklist.

How to distinguish real VDI from crafts

I repeat that we will welcome your comments and discussion of specific items that need to be added to the checklist or removed from it.