Virtualization, another health education trend

As organizations, most universities have committed the resources and personnel to building an independent and flexible structure for the education of their students. The delivery of a large infrastructure projects are of paramount global importance, but what fine structure needs to be created to support that endeavor?

That brings us back to the question of current infrastructure. Most universities implement a traditional client-server base infrastructure. This infrastructure is characterized by large number of PCs and small number of servers being supported by personnel at the desktop. This creates a situation where the majority of your IT staff’s time is spent at the desktop supporting end-users.

This is the typical dilemma of the IT department under this type of infrastructure, but with today’s technology, is it time to think outside the box for other solutions?

The simple answer is yes. As a educational institution, today’s universities have a unique opportunity to construct an environment that will serve them for many years to come. Universities should invest in the technologies of the future to support growing enterprises. What will the technology infrastructure of the academy look like in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

Since technology is constantly changing, it is important to watch the trends in the industry. After much reading, research, and watching industry trends, the conclusion has been reached that the future of the educational workstation is in virtual technology. This is not just virtual desktop installation, but a completely virtual installation that will give the user the most freedom, but with most security for IT. The PC support technician of tomorrow will be a server administrator managing virtual machines, applications and profiles running on centralized computers housed in a datacenter.

What is virtualization? In computing, virtualization is the abstraction of computing resources. It detaches the operating system from specific PC hardware and delivers a virtual environment. Additionally, virtualization allows for the delivery of application resources without affecting the base operating system.

All of the current vitalization models on the market today are trying to compete for the IT dollar. In essence the competition is between Application Virtualization vs. OS Virtualization. Once one digs past the marketing hype of the products, it is discovered that the usage of these technologies are independent and have very little overlap in the datacenter space. In other words, application virtualization does not replace operating system virtualization or vice versa; they complement each other. Taken together, they can provide a new, powerful, and secure experience for the enterprise end user.

This partnership between competing virtualization technologies is the future of the business desktop. This melding of concepts will produce a situation where the PC support for faculty and students in an organization will be done by a server administrator reducing response times.

Universities should invest its time and money building an infrastructure that will be fast and flexible in the year 2012 and beyond. That investment should position the infrastructure to utilize the coming desktop revolution. PC infrastructure dollars should be invested in three key technologies; Virtualized Desktops, Application Virtualization, and ubiquitous remote computing infrastructure.

This will provide for the building of a completely virtualized network that will allow for higher degree of security for information, but give more flexibility for users than they have ever had before. This unique vision will allow institutions to deliver highly available resources to learning communities.

By leveraging virtualization, a university would create centralized desktops in the data center that can follow a user to any terminal. The combination of these technologies will allow for a completely secure and locked-down PC environment, but will allow users to install virtual applications on their desktop. Once the user is empowered, that individual can install only approved applications and security can be assured that individual users are not installing viruses or malware on their desktops.

This new model presents the most flexible experience for our users, allows for IT to comply with licensing agreements, and provides the most secure computing environment for faculty and student. Centralized data and desktops are the most cost effective and secure methods to provide services to users. Technology has brought the desktop full circle to its terminal past.