Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a service that hosts user desktop environments on remote servers. This application is very sensitive to network latency and requires a high performance compute environment. Traditionally these types of services do not use cloud environments because few clouds support such a demanding workload for user-facing applications. As cloud environments become more robust, vendors are starting to provide services that provide virtual desktops in the cloud. OpenStack may soon provide the infrastructure for these types of deployments.

Designing an infrastructure that is suitable to host virtual desktops is a very different task to that of most virtual workloads. For example, the design must consider: Boot storms, when a high volume of logins occur in a short period of time The performance of the applications running on virtual desktops Operating systems and their compatibility with the OpenStack hypervisor

The connection broker is a central component of the architecture that determines which remote desktop host the user connects to. The broker is often a full-blown management product enabling the automated deployment and provisioning of remote desktop hosts.

There are a number of commercial products currently available that provide such a broker solution but nothing that is native to the OpenStack project. Not providing a broker is also an option, but managing this manually would not suffice for a large scale, enterprise solution.