Improving desktop as a Service in OpenStack

OpenStack is one of the major open-source solutions for creating and managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers. In this paper, we explore how the Horizon dashboard allows us to access virtual machines via a web-based remote desktop client. Besides the default remote desktop clients (based on the noVNC software), we propose to integrate in the OpenStack dashboard other alternative solutions testing both audio and video redirection feature. We consider different protocols including Virtual Network Computing (VNC) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), while our experiments aim to evaluate which the best solution currently available on the market is, also providing indications to developers on how to extend the OpenStack dashboard in order to provide the best user experience from an objective point of view.