Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

After leaving college, my friend went to a private vocational secondary school and became the director of the information center. He said that he was the information director. In fact, there was no difference between the Internet cafe network management and the two students managing more than 500 computers in the whole school. Originally, his university had already enabled cloud desktop management, which was very convenient and basically had no work. However, this vocational high school still used the restoration card ten years ago. Many cards and hard disks had been damaged for a long time, so I felt very annoyed by my daily work. So he suggested that the boss transform all the computers in the student room into cloud desktops. Consulted a number of domestic manufacturers of the scheme, each desktop 500 to 5000, and even companies quoted 10000+ per desktop sky price. After listening to the plan, the boss counseled and ordered the friend to find an open source plan to try. The commercial plan was temporarily shelved.

He found me, and we discussed this topic together: Can open source cloud platforms replace cloud desktop products in the context of education networks? In fact, similar topics have been discussed before. Open source cloud platforms and cloud desktop projects such as oVirt / OpenStack can be used in production environments. Even most of the business systems of companies like BAT are supported by open source projects. But we have presuppositions today: 1. Regular users 2. Educational scene. Then the problem may not be as simple as it seems in theory…

To analyze this problem, we first list the differences in requirements and configurations between the cloud desktop under the education network and the production environment of the Internet company.

Internet companies have at least one technical team with R & D capabilities. Not only can they easily compile and deploy source code for open source projects. It also has secondary development capabilities. Most ordinary users will only deploy binary programs based on project scripts, so the significance of whether the project is open source is only that it is free of cost, not to master the logic inside the code.

Internet companies use open source cloud platform projects mainly for the backend of business services, commonly known as server virtualization. VM is required to provide back-end business processing work for 7*24 continuous work. Most virtual server systems do not have graphical interfaces enabled. Usually, administrators only need to use SSH, Telnet, RDP and other remote console connection operations. There is no excessive interface interaction requirement. When ordinary users use cloud desktops, especially in education networks, they must have a graphical interface and the interaction effect on the graphical interface is very high, requiring sufficient smoothness. In practice, open source remote desktop protocols such as frreRDP / spice / VNC perform poorly on high-frequency graphical terminal redraws in this case. KVM has only recently begun to support GPU virtualization. Even using commercial VDI cloud desktop products requires adding dedicated GPU card support to the physical server. Classrooms cost millions. This comparison VOI solution is more appropriate, unfortunately, VOI does not currently have open source projects.

Open source cloud platforms and cloud desktop projects generally lack or do not have friendly graphical interfaces. Open source projects may provide the most core functional modules, support various operations through command line and RPC API interfaces, and have a high threshold for ordinary users to operate. Some do not have a graphical interface or use a plug-in developed by a third party to achieve WEB management. The UI presentation of such WEB interfaces is too industrialized and inconvenient for ordinary users. But professional users are less important, and they probably do most of their work from the command line.

Docking campus platform and user management system: open source cloud platform or lack of complete user management system, most of which rely on user management of server system itself. However, in the school environment, it is necessary to create user roles and user accounts that do not exist for students, faculty, etc.; different user IDs log in to use virtual machines that do not exist, and have different permissions and policies. Sometimes it is necessary to connect with other MIS systems on campus to realize data linkage. These open source projects require secondary development to be implemented. For ordinary users without R & D team support is difficult to achieve in the short term.

In summary, the basic functions of the current open source cloud desktop cloud platform project are fully available, and can adapt to the application of cloud hosts in most environments. If the back-end virtual server used by the school for business and scientific research systems is a good choice, the key is free. However, for cloud desktops that are directly operated by students, open source projects also require a lot of secondary development, and specialized technicians are required to do operation and maintenance work. It should also be noted that open source projects have almost no original support and can only rely on the cloud computing community for help. Operation and maintenance personnel are required to continuously learn and improve. Of course, such talents are also loved by large companies at present.

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