Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Lets Users Connect from Anywhere

Matthew Leger, a research manager at IDC, says VDI adoption in higher education accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many schools continue to use the technology to support remote learning, boost security and expand researchers’ access to computing-intensive resources.

“Many institutions have maintained online and flexible courses,” Leger says. “They’ve kept their VDI solutions to support students and ensure they have access, no matter where they are learning from.”

VDI Allows Universities to Go Beyond ‘20th-Century Thinking’

In addition to remote student access, Hudson County’s VDI environment powers the school’s computer labs. “The math will tell you that you’re a lot better off with the virtual environment,” Clay says. “We could put money into buying 500 computers, which we’d have to replace every five years, or we can put that money into our Nutanix environment.”

Previously, Clay says, students who needed access to powerful computing resources were forced to travel to a specific on-campus computer lab.

“If you were a science major, there were certain applications that were only available on computers in our STEM building,” she says. “We have another campus 45 minutes away, and if you were a student there, you could not use the applications you needed without coming to our Journal Square Campus. I would call it 20th-century thinking: the idea that if you’re a biology major, you’re going to be in the STEM building every day.”

The scalability of the VDI environment also allows HCCC to expand its computing environment without having to roll out new laptops. For instance, the school recently rolled out Adobe Creative Cloud. “We added memory and GPUs, but we didn’t have to buy expensive new devices,” Clay says.

VDI Puts Desktops in the Cloud

In early 2020, IT leaders at Keiser University in Florida were considering investing in Azure Virtual Desktop. When the university was forced to shut down all of its campuses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the move became a no-brainer.

“Instead of sending all of our devices and equipment out to God knows where, we said, let’s try these cloud desktops,” recalls Andrew Lee, CIO and vice chancellor of IT for the school. “Within a week, we had it up and running.”

At the time, Keiser University was supporting more than 1,000 employees with its Azure Virtual Desktop environment. That has since shrunk to around 250 people who use the solution on a regular basis, Lee says. In addition to supporting some employees who work remotely full time, Keiser uses VDI to ensure business continuity during the Sunshine State’s volatile hurricane season.

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“We used to shut down for a couple of days when a major storm was expected,” Lee says. “Now, we set up the virtual environment, and if people aren’t affected, they can get online and get to work.”

Years ago, Keiser did away with on-campus data centers, and the school now hosts essentially its entire IT environment in the public cloud via Azure. This made cloud desktops a natural fit, Lee says, and the model gives the institution more flexibility compared with an on-premises VDI environment. It also drastically reduces the maintenance burden for his team, he notes.

“The things that keep me up at night are the equipment breakdowns,” Lee says. “It always seems to happen at 4 a.m. on a Sunday, and then you have to get the part and get it installed. That doesn’t happen with the cloud.”

VDI Supports Student Choice and Equal Access

At Indiana University, the school’s Citrix virtual desktop and application environment ensures that students have access to equitable compute resources, no matter what devices they might bring with them to campus. Some students use old laptops handed down by siblings, notes Matt Decker, group manager for student technology and client virtualization. Others buy inexpensive laptops through the university or check out loaners for a semester at a time. And nearly half use Apple devices that are incapable of running Windows-only applications.

“It’s about flexibility,” Decker says. “It’s allowing the students to compute the way they want to compute. We’re giving them the access to be able to learn and study wherever they are. In the 1990s, the idea was that you compute in this brick-and-mortar location, and that’s where computing is done. That idea is absolutely as old as it sounds.”

“Students want to study wherever they are: coffee shops, parks, with their friends in the dorm room,” Decker adds. “They want to be mobile.”

Instead of traditional computer labs, Decker says, students at Indiana prefer stations where they can plug in their own devices, access virtualized applications from providers such as Microsoft and Adobe, and see their work on a larger monitor. Virtual desktops and applications, Decker says, allow the university to support a BYOD model while still ensuring that all students can access computing-intensive resources such as engineering applications and geographic information system software.

“Instructors still have a desire to give students uniformity,” Decker says. “But students want to use their own devices, because that’s what they’ve done all the way from K through 12. VDI gives the students that seamless, standardized way of instruction, even though they’re on their own devices.”

UP NEXT: Here’s how virtual desktops close higher education cybersecurity gaps.