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 Reservations by Hour

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