Toward Enabling a Containerized Virtual Desktop System

Abstract

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has emerged as a mature and widely adopted technology within the domain of cloud computing. Despite its advantages, conventional VDI solutions predominantly rely on hardware-level virtualization as the underlying backend technology, resulting in relatively high resource consumption. In this study, we propose and develop a Linux-based virtual desktop system leveraging containerization technology to address these inefficiencies. The proposed system facilitates rapid provisioning of virtual desktop environments while centralizing authenticated access through a unified network entry point. Furthermore, support for multi-cluster deployment enhances management flexibility and scalability, enabling horizontal expansion as demand increases. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that, in comparison to KVM-based virtual machines with both full-disk cloning and copy-on-write (qcow2) configurations on identical hardware, container-based deployment achieves substantial reductions in resource utilization—specifically, a 71.3% decrease in memory consumption and a 99.8% reduction in storage usage per deployed instance. Additionally, the average power draw is reduced to 58.0%, and the provisioning time is significantly shortened from 42.5 seconds to merely 2.5 seconds. A regression-based analysis further identifies the deployment scale—approximately 20 to 25 concurrent desktops—beyond which the containerized back-end becomes more efficient than the VM baselines, yielding a simple decision model for practitioners. These findings underscore the advantages of containerization in virtual desktop systems, particularly with respect to resource efficiency, scalability, energy conservation, and user experience under on-demand deployment scenarios.