Title: VDPilot: feasibility study of hosting virtual desktops for classroom labs within a federated university system

Authors: Prasad Calyam; Alex Berryman; David Welling; Saravanan Mohan; Rajiv Ramnath; Jay Ramnathan

Addresses: Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA ' Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA ' Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA ' Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA ' Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA ' Ohio Supercomputer Center/OARnet, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43012, USA

Abstract: Providing pervasive access to expensive, computational software such as Matlab and SPSS has always been a logistical and licensing challenge for a faculty who want to train their students with industry standard software. In addition, the faculty who want to manage lab exercises, assignments and exams are led to use e-mail to send and receive large files, thus limiting their ability to access and assist in the work-in-progress of students. In this paper, we present the methodology and results from our 'VDPilot' feasibility study to address such challenges by hosting virtual desktops for classroom labs within a federated university system in Ohio. The study leverages universities' pre-existing high-speed network access at the regional-level in order to: 1) assess the user quality of experience (QoE) of accessing desktop applications remotely compared to physically going to a computing lab, and 2) analyse the challenges and requirements for a shared service amongst collaborating universities.

Keywords: virtual desktops; classroom labs; VMware VDI; Apache VCL; user experiences; QoE measurement; federated cloud service; federated university systems; higher education; cloud computing; quality of experience; remote access; shared services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2014.062274

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2014 Vol.3 No.2, pp.158 - 176

Published online: 02 Jul 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article