Nowadays cloud computing is a popular paradigm to provide software, platform and infrastructure as a service to the consumers. It has been observed that seldom the capacity of personal computers (PC) is fully utilized. Desktop cloud is a novel approach for resource harvesting in a heterogeneous non-dedicated desktop environment. This paper discusses a virtual infrastructure manager and a scheduling framework to leverage idle PCs, with the permission of PC owners. Prima facie, VirtualBox is the best suited hypervisor as a backbone of the private desktop cloud architecture. A consumer is able to submit a lease to be deployed on idle resources, to launch a computation abstracted as a virtual machine (VM) or a virtual cluster using virtualization. In this approach, the role of the Scheduler is to balance both requirements of resource provider and resource consumer of the cloud in a non-dedicated heterogeneous environment. In addition, the permission of PC owners is taken into account, and consumers expect the best possible performance during the whole session. From the consumer's point of view, a prototype implementation of desktop clouds is useful for submitting lease requirement to the scheduler e.g. for running HPC applications.

This work discusses the scheduling technique for Virtual Infrastructure Management (VIM) and virtual cluster launching in private desktop clouds; besides, Virtual Disk Preservation Mode (DPM) and its relation with virtual cluster deployment time is explained. In all, it is quite challenging to yield the power of the idle resources in such a non-dedicated heterogeneous environment.