In fall 2009, the open labs on campus will extend beyond their physical walls. OIT will roll out a virtual desktop infrastructure that can be accessed from anywhere using IE browser. This means that students can access specialized academic software from home or the residence halls and that every laptop becomes a print station.

To access VDI, go to https://vlab.seattleu.edu

Benefits for our students

Our students will retain the same familiar Windows experience in our computer labs. We will still provide the same applications you have come to expect, such as: Microsoft Office 2007, Matlab, SPSS, Mathmatica, etc. USB drives will work. When students sit down in a computer lab they will log on as usual with their Seattle U credentials and not notice much of a difference.

Faster workstations. Start up and logon times are significantly reduced. When interacting with the thin client and using applications, the system will be far more responsive when compared to our current workstations. This is because the desktop and applications are running on five powerful Cisco UCS Servers, instead of at the local workstation. Sessions seamlessly move from server to server for the best allocation of resources.
Less downtime. The desktops will be hosted on our servers in the OIT Datacenter, a secure and redundantly powered facility. Every server in the cluster has redundant hard drives, power and network connections. If we need to take a server offline for maintenance or upgrades, the desktops being processed by that server will automatically be migrated to another server and the user will never even know it happened. Students get to keep on working, while we fix our servers.
The latest software, with no waiting. Right now when we deploy software to our labs, if there are software updates required for a machine the user has to wait for those to process before logging into the computer. This is not the case with thin clients and VDI. All updates are done in the background, in the datacenter, before a user logs in.
Clean, functional images. Currently we "reimage" our labs quarterly. During the quarter, applications or the operating system on that computer degrade, which is frustrating to users and generates more work for our staff. With VDI, labs are refreshed in the datacenter more frequently, so the computers are functional more often.