VDI use as remote academic lab over internet

[mobcdi]

I would be interested in hearing the opinions of VDI users of the suitability for its use in the following situation.

Providing a virtual lab in an academic institute for users who connect over the internet (some connection speeds might be as slow as dial up), Are there many VDI users out there where their users are limited by their connection speeds and doing something similar?

[lhundt · Accepted solution]

Hey,

We are currently working on this approach. We are beta testing VDM 2.0, and it is an ideal system for students to connect remotely to the Virtual Lab. We are starting out with 50 VMs to be pooled for students on Monday! I think that having VMs for students is going to be a big hit in the Academic Realm. The idea of having all of your applications available for students from home is awesome. A lot more students are commuters and cannot always make it in to the school's "physical lab" to do their homework. Applications are contained at the school. It's just another medium for students to take advantage of technology to learn....

If any other schools are interested in what we are doing please email me at lhundt@gsc.edu.

Lance Hundt

Gainesville State College

Gainesville, GA

[ppushor]

VMware themselves teach their VI3 course in this fashion - Citrix ICA over the Internet to virtual machines. Obviously as the Citrix / VMware competition heats up and as VMware introduces their own VDI solution they will move to that. But, if it is good enough for VMware's own needs it should work for anyone.

[TomHowarth]

One major security concern would be the your RDP traffic would be travelling over the internet, you may want to consider the use of a third party SSL gateway. as to the speed, redraw may be slow over a dial-up but it would be usable

If you found this or any other post helpful please consider the use of the Helpfull/Correct buttons to award points

Kind Regards

Tom,

[smajety]

As a solution it sounds great. Once VDM is released you can use it as a SSL gateway

Alternatively, you can use VAS system from either Provision networks or use AppSense in order to deploy applications or even for publishing desktops over the internet in addition of using SSL gateway provided by them. I think VMWare should also consider such additional features in their VDM. Just a thought.

The only drawback is RDP is a little fat protocol than an ICA connection. Microsoft claims that RDP 6.0 is good but haven't tested it though.

Cheers

Santosh