How to build vdi for 30 users on a budget?

Question

Virtualization

Good day.
The authorities set the task of transferring the fleet of non-licensed client and server wasps to licenses as cheaply as possible.
We decided to assemble 2-3 dual-processor servers + storage + thin clients for users (or laptops with linux on board) for such a case.
I would like to give each user their own virtual machine, make AD, 1c server on win server and database server on postgres.
The main question is:
1) what to use as a hypervisor?
2) how will users connect to their virtual machines?
3) what licenses to buy for this venture, so that it is as budget-friendly as possible?

Answer 1

Do you want direct VDI, or just a bunch of virtual workstations? :-) VDI means everything, such as creating a golden image, deploying virtual machines on demand, and so on.
If it's still VDI, then the question is not "which hypervisor", the question is "what solution". And this decision will dictate the choice of hypervisor. VMware Horizon, Microsoft RDS, XenDesktop - do you understand from the names of the vendors which hypervisors each one uses? :-) There is also a foss-cloud, also a VDI solution, as I understand it, based on KVM.
If it's just virtualization, then VMware is terribly paid, for example. Xen somehow lost ground. Free Hyper-V and KVM remain. Well, different other exotics such as VirtualBox. And, well, there is also Proxmox, you can also try it. Hyper-V server is free, and you can even build clusters, also for free. Shared storage -- SMB 3.0 or NFS balls, or iSCSI block storage.
I won’t say anything about KVM and Proxmox, but they also have their own virtual infrastructure managers. Shared storage -- NFS and iSCSI. On KVM, you can stir up the use of something like ScaleIO and get a converged system - this is when you have virtualization and storage implemented on the same servers. But there you need at least 3 nodes, and in my opinion, less than 4, and it's better not to start at all - too much overhead for disk space. ScaleIO is paid, but "for test purposes, you can use it without any restrictions." Those. you can download, install and use, there is no trial period, and there are no restrictions on functionality either.

Answer 2

1) KVM. The second option is XEN, but it's crazy.
If you set up OCFS over storage, there will be a live migration. In addition, KSM runs under KVM, which combines identical memory pages, which allows you to run more virtual machines (in fact, you will have one copy of the window in RAM, not twenty).
2) VNC | SPICE. The second one is more convenient.
3) Opensuse has a good GUI for working with a cluster of virtual machines - HAWK. The cluster is configured with two scripts out of the box.