Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Motivations for Virtual Classroom Labs
• Access to expensive, computational software such as SPSS
and Matlab is a logistical and licensing challenge
– Students: need pervasive access to the software, and have
trouble obtaining a license and installing the software correctly
on their home computers
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Registered Users
• Total Users Registered: 36
• Participating Institutions: 11
– OSU, U Dayton, U Akron, Ohio U, Walsh, Denison, BW,
Sinclair, Ashland, OARnet, OSC
• Subjective Testing Status: (September 22nd 2011 – December 8th 2011)
– 38% have completed testing
– 34% have partially completed testing
– 28% are yet to start testing
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User Workflow
• User registers at VDPilot website and requests VCL/VDI
virtual desktops
• User receives an email from OARnet with virtual desktop login
information, testing instructions and link to a survey
• Testing instructions guide user through subjective and
objective testing of virtual desktop user experience
– Subjective testing with application examples
• After testing ends, user fills out a “Survey” on VDPilot website
– Connection details (wired/wireless, client OS), Subjective
Opinion Scores, Other feedback, …
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Illustrative Screenshots on Testing
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Illustrative Screenshots on Testing (2)
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Subjective Testing Methodology
• Participants evaluate their user experience for test applications:
– Excel, SPSS, Matlab, Windows Media Player, and Internet Explorer
• Application-specific instructions:
– Excel – “Please create sample data and then create a chart for the data. While
using Excel, pay close attention to the response time of your actions.”
– Windows Media Player – “Please play a video from the virtual desktop's hard
drive and observe the audio/video quality of the video.”
– Internet Explorer – “Please go to http://www.cnn.com and observe how well the
web page performs.”
– Matlab – “Please load a pre-created script which creates a horse model and then
manipulate the model in the graph viewer. You should focus on the time it takes
to create the graph, how responsive the graph tools are and overall response
times while using the program.”
– SPSS – “Please load pre-created data, add an entry, and run a pre-created script
to analyze the data; focus on how well SPSS runs, and how quickly issued
commands were processed.”
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Subjective Testing Results
• User environment (OS, Network connection) Data
– Most used Windows 7, one used Windows XP
– Most used wired, couple of wireless last-mile connections
• VDI/VCL Preference Results
– Both VDI/VCL evenly liked, some say they will use either
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Subjective Testing Results (2)
• Preference comparison of “virtual” with “physical at home”
– Most liked using virtual
– Some preferred home better, some even preferred virtual better!, some
could not tell the difference
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Preference of VDI/VCL for Apps
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“User Quotes”
• Went in and completed it this morning and finished up the subjective survey. 2
very nice products.
• Word works better than I expected; I think it (VCL) is a better fit for us at
Denison than VMware View. I believe it would allow for the use of physical
systems in labs that are locked after hours . Thanks for setting this up.
• It (virtual) was a bit slower (compare to physical at home), but it would be great
for students to have access to programs like SPSS from houses and dorm
rooms, since downloading it to laptops proves to be a challenge every semester.
• Very similiar (virtual compared to physical desktop at home); SPSS runs slow
on the university computers too, and this virtual SPSS performed as well as the
computers in the lab.
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“User Quotes” (2)
• I would prefer VDI if the desktop was persistent so I could continue working on
the same desktop from anywhere.
• I liked the fact that VCL is open source; the VCL setup seems like it could be a
decent substitute for my home machine.
• The testing process went well, documentation was easy to follow, and only
took me twenty minutes.
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Next Steps
• Discuss with application vendors regarding licensing
– Realize “Pay-as-you-go” licensing in virtual environments
• Increase the number of participant institutions
– Involve wider demographic and underserved institutions
• Add federated authentication for virtual desktop access
– Investigate Shibboleth-like frameworks
• Re-run pilot with a distributed data center architecture
– Serve a variety of institutions across the state of Ohio
– Investigate power-savings, migration of virtual desktops, …
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Thank you for your attention!
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