Traditionally, designers and engineers requiring 2D/3D visualization and analysis used high-end physical workstations. Deploying, upgrading, and maintaining these workstations is difficult and time-consuming for IT.
Using VDI with virtual workstations instead provides an opportunity to overcome many of the challenges of IT management and maintenance as well as offering better collaboration, security, and flexibility.
Virtualization enables IT teams to deploy and present multiple virtual workstations to a user’s endpoint device. The virtual workstations reside in a data center and IT can manage and maintain them centrally. Upgrading operating systems and applications, and applying security patches is easier than in the case of physical workstations.
As the volume and resolution of visual data continues to increase so does the IT administrative burden. PowerEdge servers and NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) technologies provide a stable and robust graphics-accelerated virtualization solution that is designed to meet the increasing needs of mobile users. Using this solution, IT departments in the education sectors can reduce costs and administration, decrease provisioning times, and increase security, while delivering high-quality GPU-enhanced user experiences. Virtualized graphic-enhanced instances can be provided in both on-premises and cloud-based offerings.
A further complication to delivering a high-quality and consistent user experience in the modern higher education sector is the need to support remote learners with the same standards as are available for on-campus students, even when they are subject to a wide variety of distance and performance impacts in their LAN and WAN environments.
Approach
To address these challenges, we simulated and performance-tested several remote-user internet connectivity scenarios using two representative graphics-intensive applications, Esri's ArcGISPro and a leading Engineering CAD software application, running on Dell Technologies VDI.