Virtualization: virtually at the desktop

We have witnessed low resource utilization of high performance graphics workstations in our instructional computer laboratories. The low utilization statistics indicate that workstation consolidation could achieve great savings in infrastructure, networking, power consumption, and maintenance costs. In addition, we would spend less time in deployment, security, and fault isolation without compromising performance. The basic enabler for workstation consolidation in our instructional computing environment is the ability to allow multiple separate operating system instances and associated software packages to share a single hardware server. We have successfully utilized existing off the shelf products and developed tools and protocols to migrate processing tasks from the desktop level to the virtual desktop level running on remote hardware and returning the processing results back to the desktop level for display. Since all processing is done at the server level, we no longer need high performance graphics workstation class machines at the desktop. This allows us to offer high performance graphics workstation capabilities to any desktop, including lower-end commodity class desktop machines, notebook computers, or even thin-clients. While server consolidation through virtualization is not new, desktop workstation virtualization seemed a natural and novel extension of the server virtualization framework. Indeed, the general trend is towards applying virtualization techniques to almost all Information Technology infrastructure machinery, and we should expect to see more virtualization, virtually everywhere in higher education institutions. In this report, we will present our approach, framework, implementation challenges, lessons learned and next steps.