As of v3.1.0, ThinLinc has support for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) brokerage and administration. These features enable ThinLinc users to access Virtual Machines (VMs) hosted in a VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment in the same way as they would for a ThinLinc terminal service, using the same client software and login procedure. Users can choose between the different services in a mixed environment simply by using the profile selector.
ThinLinc v3.2.0 adds support for VirtualBox-based VDI implementations.
Pools are a logical way of grouping together machines of the same type. When a pool is created it is associated with a template, and all VMs created for the pool will then be cloned from this template. A pool can have group and location permissions associated with it to restrict access, and may contain both persistent and common machines.
A persistent VM is a machine dedicated to a particular user, and these are limited to one per user per pool. These machines are only accessible by the user who owns them and are persistent across sessions and power-cycles - i.e. changes made to these machines remain permanently, until the VM is destroyed by an administrator. Persistent VMs are therefore often referred to as 'personal' machines.
Common VMs are created for a pool and allocated to users as they log in, with the maximum number of concurrent users being determined by the size, or 'depth', of the common pool. Common VMs are semi-persistent - on a normal log out, the machine will be reverted back to its initial state and returned back to the pool with all changes being lost. If the user is disconnected or simply closes the ThinLinc client without logging off, the machine will remain persistent until the user reconnects and logs off explicitly. This means that if a user logged in to a common machine is accidentally disconnected or simply wants to continue their session later, they can reconnect and get the same pool machine they had previously, without losing their changes.
Virtual machines under VirtualBox behave similarly to those in VMware, except that machines are created as well as allocated on-the-fly. Once created, administrators may specify whether to retain the new machine for future logins, or to remove the machine when the user logs out. This provides an infrastructure similar to the concept of 'pools' described above, without having to create the machines in advance.
ThinLinc provides tools for exporting a previously created VM for use with ThinLinc. This machine may then be used as a base-image for subsequent sessions.