Any good VDI Techie knows that College computer labs and VDI were made for each other.  Before XenDesktop & Horizon View took over the leading roles in “We Do VDI Better” in the last three years, there were plenty of computer labs using Remote Desktop services and VDI-in-a-Box.  And before that, Active Directory attached PC’s with some well documented re-imaging process for those times when “somebody did something and now it doesn’t work”.  As times have changed and needs for protecting data have increased, offering accessible computing resources to College students (BYOD or not) have also increased, and a robust solution computing solution for campus environments has always been just out of reach.  Until recently….

The University of Arkansas was recently awarded this year’s Tech Target’s Access Innovation Award for their implementation of a campus-wide accessible VDI based end-user computing project.  The University of Arkansas partnered with DellEMC and leveraged their VDI Complete Solution – a package of VMware vSAN HCI solution, VMWare Horizon View, nVidia GPUs, DellWyse Thin clients & Industry proven PowerEdge R730 servers.  DellEMC was able to provide a sturdy, high performance solution (in computing and graphics processing) to cover 27,000 students on the Fayetteville, AR campus through Lab accessed resources and “roaming” access through campus WiFi and off-campus access.

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