I then installed VMware tools and View agent on the VMs. Each of the VMs had two vCPUs, 4GB RAM and a 120GB hard drive. Supported versions of these distributions can be found in the VMware documentation. View 6.2 supports four Linux distributions: Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, and NeoKylin.

I've set up View dozens of times and am very familiar with its installation process those with vSphere experience but new to View should still be able to do this in under an hour. The installation of View took me less than 30 minutes. For those interested in running only Linux desktops, View for Linux is the least costly option. VMware has three licensing options for using Linux desktops with View: Horizon 6 Enterprise Edition, VMware Workspace Suite and View for Linux.

Horizon View 6.2 allows Linux desktops to be used as virtual desktops. All VMware software was under trial licenses. I installed VMware Horizon Enterprise 6.2 to create the VDI infrastructure, then created three CentOS 6.7 Linux virtual desktops.

The virtual infrastructure consisted of a single hypervisor (ESXi 6.1) being managed by vCenter 6 VCSA. The lab hardware consisted of a Dell R610 (12 CPU cores, 96GB RAM, four 2.5' Micron M500DC SSD drives and two WD 750G Black HDD drives) a 24 port 1GB switch and various endpoint clients. In order to investigate VDI running Linux desktops, I set up a VDI environment in my lab. A simple VDI architecture is shown in Figure 1. The broker handles the entitlement of users, the association of users with virtual desktops, and in some cases the provisioning of the virtual desktops. The VM has an agent running inside of it that relays information back to the broker. I'll be using Horizon View for this investigation, but most of the information is pertinent to other VDI brokers.įor those new to using VDI, the concept is straightforward: a user uses a client device (laptop, thin client, tablet and so on) to connect to a broker in order to connect to a Linux desktop running as a virtual machine (VM) on a hypervisor. Now that all major VDI vendors support Linux desktops, I wondered if using a VDI broker with Linux could significantly help with the entitlement, authentication, provisioning, security and management of Linux desktops over physical Linux desktops. I outlined five of these in a recent article. There are many reasons that enterprises may wish to use Linux desktops within a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) broker.

Linux server vdi