Seamless Virtual Desktop Integration by Redirecting Local Resources

Abstract

Desktop virtualization introduces a novel approach in managing user environments. Going beyond the traditional thin-client based computing environment, it gives superior management with higher security, higher resource utilization, and power savings to user Desktop PCs, while providing users with new capabilities. Desktop virtualization isolates users from each other, giving each user a location independent their own customizable operating system instance, while allowing granular resource allocation and protecting users from application crashes and operating system faults caused by the activities of other users. User experience in a desktop virtualization session is largely a ected by the capabilities users are enabled. Of that, using client side resources in the desktop virtualization sessions play a major role. There exists several approaches to share and use local resources in a remote machine. But none of them are designed to be used in the context of desktop virtualization. This research address the above problem by proposing a novel design for a device sharing system for desktop virtualization environments. The design is aligned with modern PC desktop device model and capable of exporting most of the device types. To prove our design concept, we developed a prototype USB storage device sharing system and evaluated it in a desktop virtualization environment. The evaluation results shows that our approach, with some limitations, is valid and feasible enough to use in real world desktop virtualization environments.