Specifically, it has been the students of the Faculty of Informatics and Electronics who have benefited from this initiative. “The institution was forced to restrict access to its facilities overnight due to the health crisis and students lost access to IT labs. If it had not been for the VDI environment provided by Virtual Cable, it would have been impossible for them to complete the practices of the different subjects,” explains Washington Luna, Dean of the School of Computer Science and Electronics at ESPOCH.
The multiplatform nature of UDS Enterprise was crucial for all students to be able to use virtual desktops, since only some have computers. Most have smartphones and a few have tablets. “The possibility of accessing UDS Enterprise through multiple operating systems allowed students to use their own devices. For those who indicated that they did not have any terminal, we lent Raspberry Pi, minimizing the cost for the University, since they are low-cost devices. It is also worth noting the ease of use, since you only have to enter a URL in a web browser to use the virtual desktops and applications,” says Luna.
Professionals from ESPOCH’s Faculty of Computer Science and Electronics have already known about UDS Enterprise for years. “When we created the research project Models, methodologies and technological frameworks for the implementation and use of virtual laboratories, we studied and analyzed the initiatives of various universities and institutions. That’s when we discovered UDS Enterprise and started working with one of its trial versions. Its optimal performance led us to request access to its VDI platform on OVHcloud when we learned about the Open Solidarity campaign,” comments the Dean.
The implementation of the VDI infrastructure was carried out by Lobo Brothers Technology. “They not only carried out the deployment, they also advised us on the best way to configure virtual desktops and applications, we are truly satisfied and grateful for their work,” values Luna.
The experts at Lobo Brothers Technology provided them with access to a KVM-based Windows and Linux VDI platform. On the KVM hypervisor platform they configured a virtual machine as a template with the Proxmox hypervisor installed, thus creating a nested virtualization infrastructure. This template was cloned to display the number of virtual desktops that the university needed to serve its students. The virtual machines were stored in a dedicated server with 10 cores, with 26 GB of RAM and 300 GB of hard disk.
The Dean of the Faculty of Informatics and Electronics clarifies that “the members of the project Models, methodologies and technological frameworks for the implementation and use of virtual laboratories also worked on the configuration of the virtual learning environment. In conclusion, and after testing a good number of solutions, we can affirm UDS Enterprise in the cloud is the most friendly, practical and efficient one”.
Their unbeatable experience with this software, together with its many advantages, have favored that this Faculty have already “proposed to the ESPOCH authorities the acquisition of a UDS Enterprise subscription to continue using virtual desktops and applications and even facilitate remote access to computers in physical laboratories. All of this for both educational and administrative purposes,” says Luna.
Chimborazo Higher Polytechnic College is an Ecuadorian institution of higher education with headquarters in the city of Riobamba, Ecuador. It belongs to the Ecuadorian Network of Universities for Research and Postgraduate Studies and has more than 20,000 students.
For more information on our software for VDI, vApp and remote access to physical devices, you can contact the UDS Enterprise team at info @ udsenterprise.com
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