FACULTY OF CIVIL ENGINEERING ČVUT & ORBIT
The Faculty of Civil Engineering of the CTU wanted to provide its students with graphically and computationally demanding applications not only at school, but also at home, in the dormitory or in the park. Just two semesters later, thousands of future engineers could work on their projects day and night, at full power, from anywhere and from any device (if they wanted to). Which came in handy when the coronavirus quarantine came in.
EVEN STUDENTS LIKE THE HOME-OFFICE
Faculty was able to provide its students with powerful computing facilities and graphic software available from anywhere (Revit, AutoCad, Cinema 4D and others), but only in a few classrooms with virtualized desktops on a competing technology.
How to extend this solution to students all classrooms remotely accessibleand how, at the same time, in one system consolidate virtual and physical desktops in classrooms - their management, application delivery and OS provisioning?
It turns out that it won't be on the footprint of existing technology. Because it doesn't allow provisioning, a key tool for delivering operating systems with applications running on both virtual and physical desktops. A major hurdle in a situation where there are thousands of students and each of them needs to work in different classrooms, with different software and their accesses need to be managed.
SEMESTER EXAM FOR ORBIT
If the faculty leadership has decided to go the route of the concept anytime - from anywhere - from any device, we couldn't miss our solution 3D Workplace. We won the selection procedure, but we had a very tough semester at CTU.
In Phase 1, we installed Citrix infrastructure (approx. 400 licenses), including provisioning technology, across all classrooms, regardless of whether they were running lessons on physical or virtual desktops.
In Phase 2, implementation in selected classrooms Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops including debugging dozens of applications. All in all, 4 hot summer months, 7 days a week.
Finally, we managed all performance, applications and data consolidate on the faculty's server platform. We have the credit. Fine-tuning operations, environment expansion, and the tense anticipation of a sharp load on the entire Citrix infrastructure with the start of the Winter 2019 semester followed.
MAIN AND ANCILLARY BENEFITS 3D WORKPLACE
We passed the test. Remote access to all "CAD desktops" is still running today despite the usual birth pains safely and at a high level of availability.
The benefits of the solution were particularly apparent during several months of forced online teaching during the coronavirus epidemic. Teachers and students alike were able to work-from-home options you can really rely on.
But besides the students, teachers and faculty administration, we made someone else happy.
The unification of the platform has significantly relieved the burden on IT administrators of classrooms and infrastructure, who now have to manage the operating systems saves 50-70 % time, which they can then devote to developing other areas of IT infrastructure and the computerisation of teaching. (IT administrators in Doosan Lentjes.)
