Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Duke University Office of Information Technology. Common Solutions Group Summer 2012 Evan Levine. Duke Health Technology Services. VMware VDI at Patient Revenue Management Organization and Duke Raleigh Hospital
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
E N D
Presentation Transcript
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Duke University Office of Information Technology Common Solutions Group Summer 2012 Evan Levine
Duke Health Technology Services • VMware VDI at Patient Revenue Management Organization and Duke Raleigh Hospital • VDI focus decreasing in a shift to virtual applications • Citrix XenApp use increasing rapidly system wide • Duke Maestro Care (Epic ERP) system will only be available through Citrix virtual application deployment
VDI @ Duke University Today • Central Emphasis on VCL • Limited use of commercial VDI products at various schools
Virtual Computing Lab • Capacity for 300 simultaneous seats • Central and departmentally managed images • Network storage through AFS -> Moving to NAS (CIFS) • Overnight provisioning of machines for HPC to use with Condor jobs • 8 PowerEdge R710 with 2*4 Core CPUs, 72 GB RAM (576 GB Total), vSphere 4.1u1
VCL Spring 2012 Detail • Total Reservations: 5,183 • Total Hours Used: 7,782 • "Now" Reservations: 5,137 • "Later" Reservations: 78 • Load times >= 2 minutes: 383 • Total Unique Users: 775 • Unique Windows 7 Users: 717
Popularity Contest • 1. SolidWorks • 2. OIT Windows Lab • 3. ArcGIS • 4. Stata • 5. Chemistry Course Apps • 6. Nvivo
VCL Challenges Discovered • Fear of Change – VCL requires faculty, staff, and students to do something new • Network – Wireless performance is critical for synchronized use • Storage - Not all software is well suited to running with remote storage • Training – OIT only creates and maintains public computing lab and site-licensed application images
VDI @ Duke University Tomorrow? • Persistent desktops, not just short term reservations and sandbox environments • Centrally run service to ease issues of security, global expansion, travel, and platform independent access • Likely adoption of commercial products from VMware, Citrix, or similar • Virtual application deployment
Anticipated Challenges • People Still Fear Change! • Network – How well is this going to work globally? • Vendors – Compared to VCL, working with VMware and Citrix will feel very inflexible • Will this really simplify anything or reduce cost?
Technologies to Watch • Boomerang – Javascript capable of reporting user network bandwidth, latency, etc. • “noVNC” – Javascript making it possible to embed a VNC remote desktop client in a zero-install HTML5 web page • Virtual GPU solutions
