Migrating remote desktops

Most migrations discuss workloads and software applications. When it comes to users, identity federation is taken as the panacea to bring all users to the cloud. But migrating remote desktops for those users is just as important for those users when they need it. Fortunately, this comes with a well-known pattern for migration.

Autoscaling of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is done by using NICE EnginFrame and NICE DCV Session Manager. NICE DCV is a high performance remote display protocol that helps us stream remote desktops and applications from any cloud or data center to any device, over varying network conditions. When used with EC2 instances, NICE DCV enables us to run graphics-intensive applications remotely on EC2 instances and stream their user interfaces to commodity remote client machines. This eliminates the need for expensive dedicated workstations and the need to transfer large amounts of data between the cloud and client machines.

The desktop is accessible through a web-based user interface. The VDI solution provides research and development users with an accessible and performant user interface for submitting graphics-intensive analysis requests and reviewing results remotely

The components of this VDI solution include: VPC, public subnet, private subnet, an EngineFrame Portal, a Session Manager Broker, and a VDI Cluster that can be either Linux or Windows. Both types of VDI Clusters can also be attached side by side via an Application Load Balancer. The user connects to the AWS Cloud via another Application Load Balancer that is hosted in a public subnet while all the mentioned components are hosted in a private subnet. Both the public and the private subnets are part of a VPC. The users request flows through the Application Load Balancer to the NICE EngineFrame and then to the DCV Session Manager.

There is an automation available that creates a custom VPC, public and private subnets, an internet gateway, NAT Gateway, Application Load Balancer, security groups, and IAM policies. CloudFormation is used to create the fleet of Linux and Windows NICE DCV servers. This automation is available from the elastic-vdi-infrastructure GitHub repository.

The steps to take to realize this pattern are listed below:

1.       The mentioned code repository is cloned.

2.       The AWS CDK libraries are installed.

3.       The parameters to the automation script are updated. These include the region, account, key pair, and optionally the ec2_type_enginframe and ec2_type_broker and their sizes

4.       The solution is then deployed using the CDK commands

5.       When the deployment is complete, there are two outputs: Elastic-vdi-infrastructure and Elastic-Vdi-InfrastruSecretEFadminPassword

6.       The fleet of servers is deployed with this information

7.       The EnginFrame Administrator password is retrieved and the portal is accessed.

8.       This is then used to start a session.

This completes the pattern for migrating the remote desktops for users.