The team at Vilnius University in Lithuania contacted me about an open-source project they have been working on. The university developed a KVM based VDI solution for their computer classes.

The project uses qemu-kvm virtualization and provides VM based sessions with native soft clients via SPICE or RDP protocols. The broker is also able to provide access to virtual desktops created via a VMware Horizon VDI pool on vSphere.

Since KVM-VDI uses the qemu-kvm libraries it will not compatible with Nutanix Community Edition API’s, but couple people are already looking at how to port the solution and make it compatible with Nutanix CE. If possible, this would create a completely free hyper-converged VDI stack. Some of the benefits would be De-duplication, Compression, Erasure Coding, Asynchronous DR, Shadow Cloning, Replication Factor and the Acropolis Hypervisor features such as VM operations, high availability etc.

Note: KVM-VDI works natively on Nutanix CE and Acropolis Hypervisor via the qemu-kvm libraries, but management features will not be available because the solutions does not use the Acropolis APIs.

Really nice work by the folks at Vilnius University, and for now anyone can test it on any KVM hypervisor or Acropolis. The source code and binaries are available on on GitHub.

I wonder if they have a roadmap of features they want to implement.

This article was first published by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) at myvirtualcloud.net