Accelerating Desktop Virtualisation with Virtual Path Slice Technology

Cloudium Systems and RedZinc, two SMEs based in Ireland, have successfully completed an experiment funded in the 1st Open Call that relied on some of the advanced network features BonFIRE offers.

Challenge

Today desktop virtualization is offered as a local area solution. Replacing desktop PCs with thin clients and porting the processing power and operating system to the cloud offers benefits often called Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). These benefits include lower total cost of ownership per desk top unit and reduced systems administrations costs. The constraint is that today most desktop virtualization installations are based on a ‘local cloud’ and the economy of scale of the public cloud is not included in the cost equation. Specifically constraints of the public internet related to quality of experience. In the absence of guarantees related to bandwidth and delay the video rendered by desktop virtualization server hardware will be subject to image degradation and image stuttering in a public cloud scenario. How can QoE be provided and over what type of environment?

Solution

The focus of the project was to seek to provide a controlled network path between server and clients and measure the QoE of various applications. The goal was to create a SLA for DaaS. The implementation of the experiment was focused on the Virtual Wall part of BonFIRE. The attraction of the BonFIRE platform was the ability of the virtual wall to emulate a wide area network. The key ingredients of BonFIRE which supported the experiment were BonFIRE’s network components (1) ability to inject loss and delay into a network topology (2) the ability and support the software based click router. Essential to the experiment was BonFIRE’s support to assemble a router with quality of service support and hierarchical scheduler. Red Zinc’s Velox software was used to create Virtual Path Slices (VPS) through the network while Cloudiums desktop virtualisation technology was used to execute various performance benchmarking programmes over the infrastructure to profile QoE.

The principal finding  from the experiment were that DaaS requires a controlled network to provide an acceptable user-experience. Using VPS technology DaaS can be provided on infrastructure with the following characteristics or service-level agreement (SLA):

• At least 5Mbps of bandwidth
• A maximum of 50ms delay
• A maximum of 3% packet loss

FIRE Contribution

The BonFIRE facility provides this experiment with a diverse array of hardware on which to execute performance benchmarks and test applications accessed in a controllable and uniform manner. BonFIRE’s ability to create network configurations with controlled bandwidth and delay was critical for the experiment. Moreover, the ability to request deployments with the same specifications repeatedly is important for the different experiment phases.