"VDI in Education" Webinars Showcase Desktop Virtualization Successes at Colleges and Universities

We just aired the third and final webinar in our Fall 2011 "VDI in Education" webinar series, highlighting desktop virtualization deployments at University of Connecticut, Southwestern Michigan College, and William Woods University. Over 600 people registered to hear the VDI project leads at these schools talk about their technology choices, lessons learned, and benefits realized. That 600+ registered proves VDI is hot in higher ed. But it also shows colleges and universities are searching for true VDI success stories, and want to hear about real implementations from their peers before they get too deep into their projects. Well, if you missed the live events, full replays of all three are available on-demand here.

You'll find that while each school had similar goals, they all had their own unique spin on VDI:

• The UConn vPC project is a large, collaborative effort spanning the School of Business, School of Engineering, and Library, and features a diverse mix of persistent and non-persistent faculty, lab, and library desktops. UConn's VDI solution set includes Samsung/Teradici integrated zero clients, VMware View brokering software, Unidesk virtual desktop management software, VMware vSphere virtualization infrastructure, Dell PowerEdge servers, and Dell EqualLogic storage. In addition to the webinar replay, you can find a detailed account of their VDI journey at the UConn vPC web site http://vpc.uconn.edu
• Southwestern Michigan College wanted to benefit from enhanced lab access, greater student mobility, improved classroom flexibility, and lower desktop support costs - without a high upfront CapEx investment. They achieved this by using a mix of Pano Logic zero clients and re-purposed PCs for virtual desktop access, VMware View for connection brokering, Unidesk for desktop management, and VMware vSphere running on Dell servers with local storage for infrastructure (taking advantage of Unidesk's ability to provision virtual desktops using only locally attached disk).
• William Woods had similar goals as the others. But they needed to implement VDI in a compressed time frame - just 4 weeks! Their solution was Wyse zero clients, VMware View, Unidesk, VMware vSphere, HP servers, and Dell EqualLogic storage.

When people registered for the webinars, we also asked them to fill out a short survey. We now have lots of great data on what broker, storage, and hypervisor are being considered for VDI, what the biggest concerns are with VDI, and how many desktops are being virtualized. In an upcoming blog, I'll share some of these results.

Thanks to our co-sponsors and technology alliance partners Dell, VMware, and Wyse for participating with us in these webinars. But our biggest thanks goes to UConn's Jeremy Pollack (@JeremyPollackUC), Southwestern Michigan's Don Magee (@donmagee), and William Woods' Steven Goodson for their excellent presentations, and their willingness to share their VDI (and Unidesk) success stories.