Let's talk VDI.
In all of my Horizon View VDI environments I installed Microsoft ThinPC on the physical desktops to reuse the existing hardware. There are several drawbacks:
- License cost for software deployment
- License cost for antivirus software
- More overhead, still a Windows as a base system
- No network boot, if the local disk crash, the client gets useless
In order to make the VDI environment more cost efficient and reliable I came across a software called Thinstation. This and the following posts are going to be a summary about all my experiences with it.
Thin what?
With Thinstation we are able to create a customized linux image and integrate the VDI Client of our choice. We can put the image on a PXE/TFTP server and let the physical computer boot from it. That means
- No more license cost
- centralized management
- local disk not needed, OS runs in memory
To create this "magic" image, we have to setup a linux and install Thinstation.
Howto start
Devstation
There is a pre-configured linux provided by the programmer, called "Devstation". The Devstation is based on the latest stable release. You can follow these instructions. The installation is well documented. Dont worry... you can do this.
Your own system
You can easily download the repo on your own linux vm.
There is alot of developing going on lately (10.4.2016). If you have any problems, bugs, errors or whatever...try the master branch instead of the stable release.
In the next post I am going to explorer how u can setup, configure and integrate the VDI Client into ThinStation.