flexVDI Dashboard provides a full graphical user interface to manage the Guests, Pools, and other logical objects of the flexVDI virtualization platform. This tutorial provides an introduction to basic operations using the flexVDI Dashboard. It describes the parts of the program which correspond to the objects in the infrastructure. The tutorial will guide you through the steps required to set up a complete basic environment, until you create a Guest machine and connect to it. This guide assumes that you have a running flexVDI Manager and a flexVDI Host. Installation and configuration of these servers is out of the scope of this document, and the reader should refer to the relevant documentation. The Getting Started guide is a good starting point.
Software requirements
These are the requirements for the machine where the flexVDI Dashboard will be installed:
flexVDI Dashboard Installer for Windows
The windows installer includes all the packages required to run flexVDI Dashboard. No additional software is required.
flexVDI Dashboard Installer for Linux
In order to fully execute flexVDI Dashboard, you need to have correctly installed Spicy. This spice protocol client is used by flexVDI Dashboard to connect to the consoles of the Guests. It is part of the package spice-gtk-client, and can be installed from your Linux distribution repositories with the following command (that you should execute with root privileges):
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RedHat/CentOS/Scientific Linux
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yum install spice-gtk-tools
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Ubuntu/Debian
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apt-get install spice-client-gtk
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OpenSUSE
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zypper install spice-gtk
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If you don't have Spicy installed, you will be able to use flexVDI Dashboard to manage your flexVDI Data Center, but you won't be able to open the consoles of the Guests.
, as described in the Getting Started guide.
As of flexVDI 3.1, flexVDI Dashboard is a web application served by the flexVDI Manager instance, so no installation is required. Just open a modern web browser and point it to https://your-manager-ip. Your browser will complaint about the server TLS certificate being self-signed. This is normal, just add an exception for it (but make sure you are connecting to the right IP address).
Minimum browser version
flexVDI Dashboard uses some modern web APIs, and will only work on these web browsers:
- Mozilla Firefox
- Google Chrome
- Apple Safari
- Opera
- Microsoft Edge: Not supported
- Microsoft Internet Explorer: Not supported
Previous steps
In order to follow the instructions in this guide, previously you'll need to set up the following infrastructure:
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- flexVDI Hosts: IP address or name, and a path with disk space to store the disk images of the virtual machines.
- flexVDI Manager: IP address, user (default is admin) and password.
- Network path (server ip, path, and file name) and credentials (user and password) to read the ISO file with the OS Installation that you want to install in your Guest.
flexVDI Dashboard installation
Windows installation
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- .
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Linux installation
There are two Linux versions of the installer. One for 32 bits i586 machines, and one for x64 machines.You can determine which one better suits your OS installation by executing the following:
$ uname -i |
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Download the right installer from flexvdi.com, and save it in the directory where you wish to install it.
Now open a terminal, go to the directory where you saved the downloaded file, and give the installer program execution permission with:
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$ chmod u+x ./flexVDI_Dashboard_3.0.n-x64_installer.runExecute the installer clicking on it, or executing:
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$ ./flexVDI_Dashboard_3.0.n-x64_installer.runNow you can launch the flexVDI Dashboard with:
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$ ./flexVDI_Dashboard_3.0.n-x64/flexVDIDashboard.shOverview
In this guide we will create the elements needed to start launching Guest Virtual Machines in a simple infrastructure. We will:
- Define and use a connection to the flexVDI Infrastructure interlocutor: flexVDI Manager.
- Define the disk space where our Guest´s disks will be stored: a Volume.
- Define the shared folder where the OS installation files reside: a Media Storage.
- Finally we will create a Guest, launch it, and connect to its console.
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