Agents¶

An Agent is any compute resource where user sessions can be provisioned. The compute resource needs the Kasm Agent installed.

View Agents¶

View a list of Agents by selecting Agents from the Kasm UI.

More details about an individual Agent can be seen by clicking the View (eye) icon.

../_images/agent_details.png — **Agents Details**¶

The bar chart shows two different stats for RAM and CPU respectively. It shows how much RAM/CPU is currently being utilized and it shows how much is currently allocated. If you have an agent that has 6 CPUs, is overriden to 12 CPUs, and has two desktops allocated, 1 at 2 CPUs and 1 at 3 CPUs, it will show 5 of 12 CPUs are allocated. It will also show what the current CPU utilization was during the last checkin.

Agent Chart¶

Historical CPU, Memory, and disk utilization can be tracked for an Agent by viewing the Dashboard in the Kasm UI.

Agent Settings¶

Agent settings may be configured from the Kasm UI by selecting Agents -> Edit (Pencil Icon)

Enabled	When checked, the Agent will service requests to create sessions. When disabled, the Agent will not be considered for requests to create more sessions. This is useful to “drain” sessions from an agent prior to maintenance.
Automatically Prune Images	Instruct the Agent to automatically delete (prune) unneeded images. Only Kasm Workspaces images are pruned. Off - Pruning is disabled. Normal - Prune untagged (dangling) images. Aggressive Prune untagged images and any image that is no longer defined in the application.
Cores Override	Instruct the system to treat the Agent as if it has this number of CPU Cores. This is useful to tactically oversubscribe the Agent. 0 indicates no-override. The system will use the actual CPU Cores of the system.
Memory Override	Instruct the system to treat the Agent as if it has this amount of Memory (in bytes). This is useful to tactically oversubscribe the Agent. 0 indicates no-override. The system will use the actual memory of the system.

CPU / Memory Override¶

An Agent reports how much RAM and CPU resources are available on the system. If an Agent has 6 CPUs and 6 GB of RAM and all Images are set to 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM, only 6 sessions can be provisioned on the Agent at one time.

You can, however, override CPU and RAM.

Here you are able to override the CPU and RAM. A value of 0 means no override. If an agent server has 6 CPUs, you can, for example, configure an override of 12 CPUs. This would allow you to provision 12 instances of a user desktop, if each image was set to 1 CPU. The agent would need still need 12 GB of RAM to provision 12 users if each image was set to 1GB of RAM. You can also override RAM in the same manner as CPUs. It is important to ensure your servers have a SWAP partition adequate in size to overcome over utilization of RAM. Not having a swap file can result in user desktops being destroyed with RAM is over subscribed.

GPU Support¶

Workspaces supports passing through NVIDIA based GPUs to streaming containers. Workspaces utilizes the NVIDIA container toolkit. For a full list of supported GPUs and operating systems see https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/gpu-operator/platform-support.html. The NVIDIA drivers and container toolkit must be installed on all Workspaces Agent servers with GPUs intended to pass through to containers. GPUs can be used within a streaming container for a number of purposes, to include graphics, gaming, running applications that use CUDA, and developing with GPU accelerated frameworks such as Pytorch or Tensorflow. Using Workspaces allows organizations to easily manage and provide access to GPU backed resources.

Workspaces allows administrators to see how many GPUs an agent has.

../_images/agents_view.png — **Agent GPU Resources**¶

Administrators can view the details of an Agent and expand the GPU section to view more details.

../_images/agent_details1.png — **Agent GPU Details**¶

Workspaces images allow defining GPU requirements. Check the require GPU checkbox to ensure the image is only provisioned on agents with GPUs. Set the number of GPUs this container should be assigned, using a count of 0 will assign all GPUs. A requested session using this image will only be provisioned on an agent that has the number of selected GPUs or greater.

../_images/image_details.png — **Image Settings**¶

Changing Manager Token¶

An administrator may wish to change the token that Agents use to check into the manager. The steps outlined below will change the token on each of the agents and on the manager.

Warning

Changing the Manager token involves restarting Kasm services and will result in an interruption in service.

First, enter the Kasm Admin UI, Settings and change the value of “Token” in the manager settings to your new desired token.

../_images/manager_token.jpg — **Manager Token Settings**¶

Login to each server with the agent role and complete the following steps:

Stop the Agent Services

sudo /opt/kasm/bin/stop

Replace the value of ‘token’ in the agent config with the new manager token.

sudo vi /opt/kasm/current/conf/app/agent.app.config.yaml

Start the Agent Services

sudo /opt/kasm/bin/start

After one minute the Agents should all be checked back into the Manager as shown in the “Agents” page in the Kasm Admin UI.