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 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 with flexVDI 2.2 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):

Alternatively, it can be dowloaded from:
http://www.spice-space.org/download.html

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.

Previous steps

In order to follow the instructions in this guide, previously you'll need to set up the following infrastructure:

• One flexVDI Host
• One flexVDI Manager
• One Windows shared folder (or another CIFS/SMB server) with an ISO image of the Operating System installer for the Guest Virtual Machine.

Getting Started with flexVDI 2.2 provides detailed information to install and configure your flexVDI Hosts and flexVDI Manager, and explains how to setup a CIFS server using flexVDI Config.

While following this guide, you will need to have the following information at hand:

• 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

Just download the latest version of flexVDI Dashboard installer from http://flexvdi.com/ and execute it as a user with administrative privileges. This will create an icon in the desktop, and an entry in the Start Menu.

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

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:

$ chmod u+x ./flexVDI_Dashboard_2.2.n-x64_installer.run

Execute the installer clicking on it, or executing:

$ ./flexVDI_Dashboard_2.2.n-x64_installer.run

Now you can launch the flexVDI Dashboard with:

$ ./flexVDI_Dashboard_2.2.n-x64/flexVDIDashboard.sh

Overview

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.