Hi Bodhi
I work at an Educational Institute managing around 32 computer rooms located in at one college and one campus.
We are currently running VMware View 5.1.1 with 14 Pools and a total of 350 virtual machines to a number of different teaching sections. e.g. Electrical engineering, CISCO Academy, Accounting etc.
Back in 2009 the college became a VMware IT Academy and we decided to look into VDI and run a pilot with View 3.
After a semester evaluating we decided to implement a small production environment with View 4.0 and as I mentioned we are now running View 5.1.1.
We deliver desktop services to physical computers, repurposed computers (6 Computer rooms), Zero clients (3 Computer rooms) and portable devices laptops.
Advantages in an educational environment:
- Delivering desktop services to portable devices (students own laptops) this is the Institute future planning BYO devices.
- Delivering new applications over night either by updating the golden image or using the Thinapp solution.
In the past we would normally plan our software upgrades at the holiday break so not to impact classroom deliveries.
- Classroom utilisation, we have challenges with most of our classrooms with low utilisation usage per week and specialised applications
available in only in one or two rooms. With the introduction of VDI we were able to close a number of rooms and provide better services to all
classrooms throughout the college.
- Management & support savings
- Power and Green savings “using the Zero client”
I have provided some pictures of our new open access lab using Leadtek Zero Client.