Desktop alternatives to VNC integration in Open OnDemand

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1

Hello,

I would like to know whether Open OnDemand supports any interactive desktop solution other than VNC that can be integrated with it.

Currently, I understand that Open OnDemand commonly uses VNC-based desktop sessions for remote graphical access. I am exploring whether there are other supported or community-tested options, such as NICE DCV any other desktop/session streaming solutions, that can be integrated with Open OnDemand.

Has anyone implemented or evaluated alternatives to VNC with Open OnDemand? If yes, could you please share any guidance, documentation, limitations, or best practices?

Thank you.

2

Hi:

The simple answer is, not really, but there is a lot of interest in that.

With the general industry migration from X Server to Wayland, the core dev team is spending significant time trying to figure out the best way to handle this, and part of that involves which protocols to support.

For example, there has been some interest from the Selkies (which is WebRTC) dev team in integrating with Open OnDemand (there are some other threads here on discourse you can search for with much more details).

AWS actively supports Open OnDemand deployments (see GitHub - aws-samples/open-on-demand-on-aws · GitHub ) and since they own NICE DCV, I believe there are some instances where clients are using NICE DCV with the platform. But that isn’t something broadly documented.

The other main protocol out there is RDP, which is primarily a Microsoft Windows ecosystem thing. Like with AWS, Microsoft Azure actively supports Open OnDemand (see Quickstart - Deploy Azure CycleCloud Workspace for Slurm - Azure CycleCloud | Microsoft Learn ) and I believe there are some instances where clients are using RDP clients, but it’s not broadly documented.

As always, the core dev team is very limited in our time and expertise, so we encourage active support / engagement with the community in terms of development tasks.