|Manuals

Choosing a Compute Path

Thinfinity® Cloud Manager makes compute available to users through three paths: Managed VMs, VDI/DaaS Models, and Kubernetes Models. They appear together at the top of the left tree, and they answer different questions about your starting point. Pick the one that matches where your compute comes from; each path’s own article covers how to configure it.

Managed VMs

Choose Managed VMs when the machine already exists. You register a virtual machine that was provisioned outside Cloud Manager — on a cloud provider or an on-premises hypervisor — and Cloud Manager connects to it, monitors its state, and routes user sessions to it. It does not provision, resize, or destroy the machine; that lifecycle stays with whoever created it. This path fits dedicated machines, specialized or licensed software that can’t be freely cloned, and bare-metal infrastructure you want to reach through the same interface as your cloud workloads.

See Managed VMs.

VDI/DaaS Models

Choose a VDI/DaaS Model when you want Cloud Manager to create the machines for you. A model is a blueprint that Cloud Manager uses to provision, manage, and decommission VMs on demand from a template — with pooling, scheduled or on-demand provisioning, staged power, and golden images. This path fits elastic virtual-desktop and application-server workloads, whether users share a pool of interchangeable instances or each gets a persistent one created on first use.

See VDI/DaaS Models for templates, deployment triggers, pool modes, and power and destroy options.

Kubernetes Models

Choose a Kubernetes Model when your sessions run as containers. Cloud Manager stores a Kubernetes manifest and brokers a pod on demand for each user session, removing it when the session goes idle; the cluster schedules and runs the pod. This path fits organizations already running Kubernetes and containerized workloads. Its primary use case is Remote Browser Isolation — secure, containerized browsing where all rendering happens server-side and only pixels reach the user.

See Kubernetes Models and Remote Browser Isolation (RBI).

Quick Reference

Path Use it when Who owns the lifecycle Learn more
Managed VM The machine already exists You, or an external system Managed VMs
VDI/DaaS Model You need VMs created on demand from a template Cloud Manager VDI/DaaS Models
Kubernetes Model You run containerized sessions, or need browser isolation Cloud Manager and the cluster Kubernetes Models · RBI

All three paths reach end users through Access Profiles in Thinfinity® Workspace. The way you create an Access Profile differs by path — see Connecting Users to Instances.

See Also