Public exams at UIB using VDI managed by UDS Enterprise

When designing the VDI deployment for the public exams, the staff of the Information Technology Center of the university faced the challenge of serving around 750 virtual desktops with a limited hardware infrastructure. Due to the high volume of candidates and the maximum capacity of concurrent users supported by the platform, they decided to perform the test in three different shifts. But still, they weren’t sure that it would be able to sustain that volume of virtual desktops.

To solve this issue, they got in touch with the UDS Enterprise team, who suggested them to make the most of the innovative cache system incorporated in the UDS Enterprise VDI and vApp connection broker, which optimizes resource performance.

Xavier Pons, Responsible for the infrastructure area of the Information Technology Center of the UIB, explained how they orchestrated the deployment to carry out the examinations successfuly following the instructions given by the connection broker support team:

“We generated in advance three service pools with around 250 non-persistent virtual desktops each on our UDS Enterprise platform. Due to the limitations of our virtualization infrastructure, we only left up and running in cache the virtual machines for the first shift. Meanwhile, the other machines were forced to a standby state also in cache. Thus, we avoided that they were consuming resources unnecessarily, but they were ready to be turned on as necessary.

Once the test started and the first 250 virtual desktops were turned on, we lowered the cache to 5, to have some machines ready in case any issue occurred and we had to quickly serve a new virtual desktop to one of the examinees. As the candidates of the first shift finished their exam and left their session, the virtual machines were automatically deleted.

Once the first shift test was completed, the machines for the second shift were gradually turned on to avoid collapsing the infrastructure, and the second shift was started. And we proceed in the same once this second shift finished and before the start of the third one.

In short, public exams were carried out without any incident taking advantage of our virtual desktops platform with UDS Enterprise , using different cache configurations for the management of the machines for each shift and for our virtualization platform”.