Creating a disk image for the QVD is incredibly simple and customizing each image for your users similarly so. We’ve updated our documentation section to include new sections on this important task for a QVD administrator with dedicated sections for disk image creation for SLES and 0penSUSE (pdf) and Ubuntu ((pdf):
- QVD Disk Image Creation (SLES 11 SP2) (html) (pdf)
- QVD Disk Image Creation (Ubuntu 12.04) (html) (pdf)
The guides will walk you through installing a base system using KVM and then either customizing that system for use as a Virtual Desktop, or going on to use that base system to build an LXC container for the same. We’ve used the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment or LXDE as it provides a stable and intuitive environment with a low memory footprint and thus makes an excellent base for your customized environment.
As you will see, customizing a disk image is very simple. Before you roll it out to your users, you will be running each image locally and from there your imagination is the limit. All the software and
customizations you make to each image will be rolled out to every user who makes used of that image. So you can install the things that are important to your users once, and rest assured that they will have that software available immediately you deploy the image.
Once your image is ready, deploying it is a simple matter of unzipping it into QVD’s staging folder and rolling it out using the Web Administration Tool we provide.
We finish up the guides with a few tips and tricks – remote logging of your desktops with syslog and installing a couple of commonly used apps as well as optimizing the image by removing unnecessary services. Again, nothing that anyone with a modicum of Linux experience would find challenging, the whole process is painless and easy.