Virtualization in education

Virtualization in education can help school IT departments deliver faster and more reliable service, free up critical resources, and help reduce costs.

Automate campus-wide application deployment.

Manage applications for school labs.

Run multiple operating systems, including legacy software.

Enable students to access school applications from a variety of devices.

Video: University of Miami virtualization solution

Video: University of Miami cuts energy costs, deployment times with virtualization solution.

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Overview

Virtualization in education

Successfully managing multiple sites and an array of faculty, staff, and student needs is becoming increasingly difficult as budgets decrease and equipment and facilities age. Use virtualization in education to help cut costs, increase efficiency, and adapt quickly and automatically to changing requirements.

Choose from:

Hardware virtualization. Run multiple operating systems (for example, Linux and Windows) on a single server.
Application virtualization. Rapidly deploy applications, even those that conflict with each other, with low administrative overhead.
Presentation virtualization. Execute an application on one computer and present it with another.
Desktop virtualization. Run multiple operating systems (OSs) on a single desktop. Centrally execute Windows 7 in virtual machines (VMs) running on servers.
Virtualization management. Manage your entire virtual and physical infrastructures with a unified set of tools.

All the products and technologies we use in virtualization solutions have a common, policy-based management system that helps to ease the load on system managers.

Greater flexibility

Traditionally, all layers of computing environments—hardware, OS, applications, and storage—were static, configured to interact properly and to support a specific computing solution. Components were installed to particular computers, resulting in a tightly bound system that often made adapting to change difficult. Creating new capability entailed procuring and configuring the hardware, software, and interfaces—which could be costly and time intensive.

Virtualization frees each element of this system from the other. In a virtualized stack, each element is logically isolated and independent. By separating the different layers in the logic stack, you have greater flexibility and more simplified change management because you don’t configure each element to get them to work together. Computing components become instantly available. This makes it easier to add, update, and support all the infrastructure elements which creates the foundation for utility computing—and a much more nimble organization.

Benefits

Help reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase your return on investment (ROI) across your entire computing infrastructure.
Turn computing assets into on-demand services to improve your business agility.
Maintain "one application, one server" while reducing physical server sprawl through server consolidation and provisioning.
Provide optimal desktop solutions for different user needs while still meeting IT requirements.
Centrally provision and manage both physical and virtual resources.
Help ensure effective business continuity and disaster recovery by compartmentalizing workflows and maintaining failover plans.
Rapidly model and test different environments without significant expansion of hardware and physical resources.
Improve security by isolating computing layers and minimizing the chance of widespread failure.