Organizations in the Higher Education and Career and Technical Education sectors are adopting virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to benefit from centralized management, better security and compliance, and worker mobility. Users in these sectors typically run professional-grade graphics applications that require advanced graphic acceleration by dedicated GPU hardware.

Running professional graphics software on virtualized platforms provides many benefits, including:

• The ability to work or learn from anywhere
• A better return on infrastructure investment
• A quicker time-to-market with faster software development life cycles
• The ability to dynamically meet the development requirements of educational users
• More favorable user experiences

With the changing dynamics of present-day education and the diversity of user situations (such as working from campus or from home), it has become challenging for IT teams to provide a consistent user experience. For example, a user viewing 3D geographic scenes at the end of a remote internet connection — which could be subject to a wide range of distance and performance impairments — might not experience the same image quality as someone viewing them on campus.

This technical white paper describes performance considerations and best practices to optimize the remote user experience on professional graphics-accelerated applications for Higher Education, with a focus on geographic information systems and engineering computer-aided design (CAD) applications. This paper provides details of performance test results for both baseline local area network (LAN) and remote wide area network (WAN) user experiences with virtual desktop implementations of Esri's ArcGIS Pro and an Engineering CAD application, on Dell Technologies VDI with NVIDIA virtual GPUs, using NVIDIA’s nVector performance monitoring tool.