QVD was recently featured on OpenEnchilada, a Mexican podcast dedicated to discussing new trends in technology. Nito Martinez, the QVD project lead, was interviewed on a variety of topics including the the forthcoming release of QVD 3.1 and some of the new technical features that users can look forward to.
A video of the interview is available in Spanish at http://openenchilada.com/twitcam-de-the-open-enchilada-project-s04e15/.
During the interview, Mr Martinez revealed that a tentative release date for QVD 3.1 has been set for the end of April. The new release of QVD will bring numerous new features that extend QVD’s capabilities. Most important is the incorporation of Linux Containers (LXC) as one of QVD’s supported virtualization technologies. LXC will not only allow QVD to provide greater scalability and better performance for Linux-based virtual desktops, but when used in conjunction with existing KVM virtualization, will allow QVD to support virtual desktops for other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows.
Mr Martinez also provided some explanation for how QCOW2 images work within the QVD infrastructure, to allow QVD to facilitate thin-provisioning and to separate writable content from the core operating system image which remains read-only withing the environment. This led to a discussion about “overlays”, which are separate QCOW2 image files that can be mounted over the operating system at run time, to allow for the writing of system data such as log files, runtime PID information, variable data and temporary files.
The use of QCOW2 images is quite different from the newly supported LXC technology that now also features within the QVD. When using LXC, operating system images are stored in the form of ‘containers’ which are direct copies of a fully functional Linux environment. Mr Martinez described how containers are similar to the standard unix concept of a chroot, but that they offer much more separation allowing for more complete virtualization. He also described some of the team’s experiments with different filesystems such as ‘aufs’ and ‘unionfs’ in order to facilitate the storage of overlay and user home data.
Mr Martinez also joined in the discussion on Internet freedom, new business initiatives in the software arena in Mexico and on other current news items in the technology industry. You can download the podcast audio at 
.