flexVDI is a desktop virtualization platform. Using well-known, open-source technologies, it provides a stable, performant infrastructure for both Windows and Linux desktops. Its main features are:
- Based on CentOS 6, uses Qemu/KVM, Spice and libvirt.
- Installable on bare-metal.
- Supports virtualization of Windows from XP to Windows 10, Windows Server from 2003 to 2016, and all flavors of GNU/Linux.
- Scalable to thousands of desktops.
- Template based desktops.
- LDAP or AD based authentication/authorization.
- Supports shared storage like SAS, FC, iSCSI, etc...
- Failure-tolerant cluster.
flexVDI must be installed on a set of physical servers, that form a VDI cluster. This document will guide you through the process of downloading, creating physical media and installing flexVDI 2.2 on your physical servers.
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- Guest: A virtual machine defined by a given configuration, some host resources and one or more disk images.
- Host: Each one of the physical servers devoted to run Guests. The flexVDI distribution is installed on these machines.
- Pool: collection of resources (CPU and, RAM) allocated in each Host
- Template: A special type of Guest, where the whose logical content is frozen in order to generate Clones.
- Clone: A special type of Guest, created from a Template, that shares part of its configuration with this one. Disk images from Clones rely on their corresponding Template, and only store the differences between its current state and the state from of their parent.
- Image Storage: Set of disks available for storing the disk images that Guests use. It is divided in several Volumes. One Image Storage is only available to those Hosts that can access all of its disks.
- Internal Volume: Component of a Image Storage. The cluster filesystem used in a Volume is created and managed by flexVDI software. Provides disk space for the Guests Images. Uses one or two (for redundancy) disks as its physical support.
- External Volume: Hosts directory path where Guests images are stored. The directory can be local or it can be a mounting point from an external storage system. It must be visible to every Host. External Volumes are installed and managed by the system administrator using the tools provided by the manufacturer of the storage.
- Media Storage: Shared resource where ISO images are stored. It is only made visible to Hosts defined in its creation.
- Direct Storage: Option used to provide a Guest direct access to physical disks.
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