VDPilot: feasibility study of hosting virtual desktops for classroom labs within a federated university system.

Providing pervasive access to expensive, computational software such as Matlab and SPSS has always been a logistical and licensing challenge for a faculty who want to train their students with industry standard software. In addition, the faculty who want to manage lab exercises, assignments and exams are led to use e-mail to send and receive large files, thus limiting their ability to access and assist in the work-in-progress of students. In this paper, we present the methodology and results from our ‘VDPilot’ feasibility study to address such challenges by hosting virtual desktops for classroom labs within a federated university system in Ohio. The study leverages universities’ pre-existing high-speed network access at the regional-level in order to: 1) assess the user quality of experience (QoE) of accessing desktop applications remotely compared to physically going to a computing lab, and 2) analyse the challenges and requirements for a shared service amongst collaborating universities.