Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
We received $100K this year in Campus Technology Council funding for a pilot program to investigate Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI is both a new technology, and something of a throwback; the idea is that you can install what is essentially a dumb terminal at the desktop, do all your processing on servers in the data center, and save yourself money and time managing hardware and software on a whole bunch of distributed desktops. The thing that makes VDI different than a dumb terminal solution, or existing technologies like Microsoft Terminal Server, is that VDI allows you to customize and virtualize individual desktop environments.
What that means is that you can give each person a computing environment that’s specific to his or her needs; you can get the advantages of thin clients while still being able to install customized software on an individual basis. Or, if your business needs dictate uniformity (such as in a computing lab), you can create a single image to be used by multiple devices, which always reverts to the default state when the user logs out.
If the technology works, it would mean that we could shift from replacing relatively expensive desktop machines every 3-4 years, to replacing cheap thin clients every 5-6 years. We would save money on hardware, but more importantly, we would save a lot of time and effort in setting up computers, and users would have less downtime. If something were to go wrong with a client, a replacement with identical functionality, and access to all the same files and applications could be installed within minutes.
VDI can also be accessed from a normal PC (or Mac or Linux box) using Microsoft’s RDC protocol. That means you can have access to the same session from multiple computers; for example, a lecturer could work on his presentation on a thin client in his office, continue working on it on his laptop in a cafe, and then display it on a classroom computer, all without having to log out or re-open the document. VDI can also be used as a lightweight replacement for Parallels or VMWare Fusion on Macs for folks who need access to a Windows environment.
In L&S, we are looking at testing several use cases:
- Lecturers–folks who often have the worst computers, shared office space, and a high degree of mobility.
- Labs (and drop-in machines)–places where we want to maintain a clean, standard desktop environment.
- Administrative task workers–front desk staff, or others whose work is fairly routine.
- Mac users needing access to Windows.
We just rolled out our first thin client (in the French library), and will be rolling out more over the next few weeks. We have also begun setting up Mac users to access our infrastructure. There have been a few glitches–the technology is definitely not yet fully mature. But it basically seem to work for most use, and it has a lot of promise. We’re using VMWare’s View product, which is undergoing rapid development, and the vendor has been pretty responsive to our needs.
We have funding to run the program through the summer, and we’re looking for funding to extend it through the fall. As long as we have funding, there will be no cost for participating in the pilot. We’ll ask users to fill out an evaluation survey at the end of the pilot.
If you are interested in seeing whether this would work for you, contact Seth Novogrodsky, who’s our lead on the project.
Side note about Macs: We would love to be able to provide Mac OS X over VDI, as well, but Apple’s licensing doesn’t allow it. It would not be technically difficult; VMWare already provides Mac server virtualization.
