Technology


QVD supports two different virtualisation technologies: KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) and LXC (Linux Containers). Each virtualisation technology comes with its own set of advantages and will prove more useful for particular use cases. Therefore, a good understanding of your own requirements and an understanding of these two technologies will help you to determine how to configure your QVD deployment.

QVD architecture

This image shows the typical network connectivity and interactions between the different components within a production environment. Here, it is clear that the L7R components are accessed via a standard hardware load-balancer, but are still capable of routing connections to the correct Virtual Machine, even if it is running on a different node server. The image also shows how the Virtual Machines are loaded from images stored within a shared storage environment, while the HKD is able to start up Virtual Machines for users as they are required

High-Level Architecture Diagrams

In this section we will provide some simplistic diagrams explaining the architecture of a typical QVD deployment to show how the different components interact.

1 Client and Server Interaction in the QVD Architecture

2 QVD-WAT and server node interactions in the QVD architecture

Deploy your virtual desktops from different hypervisors

Linux Containers (LXC)

LXC provides Operating system-level virtualisation. In this way, they act as an alternative to the full hardware-level virtualisation provided by the KVM hypervisor. LXC behaves in a similar manner to a chrooted environment within Linux, but offers a greater level of isolation and management of resources between containers through the use of namespaces and cgroups. For instance process IDs (PIDs), network resources and mounts for each container will be isolated from other containers and can be logically grouped together to apply resource management rules and other policies specific to the container. This allows you to gain many virtualisation benefits while keeping down overall resource requirements and by re-using the same kernel across virtual machines. LXC is fully supported by the Linux Kernel, and has been included in QVD.

Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)

KVM is a fully featured hypervisor that runs inside of the kernel of the linux host operating system. The hypervisor ensures absolute separation from the underlying host operating system, allowing you to load completely different operating systems and distributions into each virtual machine and expect them to function just as if they were running on completely separate hardware.
While there is some debate over whether KVM is actually a Type-1 bare-metal hypervisor, since it does require the linux Kernel in order to function, most virtualisation experts agree that combined with the linux Kernel, KVM functions in exactly the same way as any other bare-metal hypervisor, such as Xen or VMware’s ESXi. In fact, in the recently published SPECvirt 2011 benchmark reports, KVM came second in performance only to VMWare ESX, indicating a high level of viability as a commercial-grade virtualisation platform.
Since KVM uses absolute separation, it is much easier to configure and manage than LXC. However, although it offers competitive performance to other hardware hypervisors, each virtual machine is necessarily running its own kernel. Resources need to be dedicated to each virtual machine, whether they are being used or not. In this way, KVM is not as efficient as LXC, but offers much greater flexibility and ease of management.

Personalise the image through your Hypervisor and Operating System

suse-logo

QVD for SUSE

 

  • DI openSUSE 12.3 -Xfce Desktop for KVM
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  • DI openSUSE 12.3 – Xfce Desktop for LXC
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Ubuntu-logo

QVD for UBUNTU

 

  • DI Ubuntu 16.04 LTS – Xfce Desktop for KVM
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  • DI Ubuntu 16.04 LTS – Xfce Desktop for LXC
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imagen-qvd-para-centos

QVD for CentOS

 

  • DI CentOS 7.2 - Mate Desktop for KVM
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  • DI CentOS 7.2 - Mate Desktop for LXC
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Customise the disk image from your desktop

XFCE-logo

QVD on XFCE

Gnome-logoQVD on GNOME

Mate logoQVD on MATE

Product technical resources

QVD Release 4.0

Find here the QVD domuntation and related technologies

QVD Installation Guide

This guide helps users learn how to install QVD

QVD documentation

Access to all the technical information of the product