Didier Contis is director of technology services for the Georgia Tech College of Engineering. The largest of Georgia Tech’s six colleges, CoE offers more than 50 graduate and undergraduate degree programs through its main Atlanta campus and satellites around the world. Its 12,000 students use an estimated 150 unique apps—the same ones businesses rely on to design airplane wings, model circuit-board layouts, and much more.

Contis took on COE’s newly created director position in 2007 and initiated the Virtual Lab (Vlab) project as one of his top priorities. He viewed it as a strategic initiative from the start. “We were never after cost savings, although we may see them in the long run from better hardware utilization,” he recalls. “Our goal has always been to overcome the problems of traditional computer labs and lower the barriers to software access for our students.” 

One of Vlab’s objectives is to support COE’s 10-year strategic plan, which envisions a growing global presence and an increase in student-designed degrees. “To do those things, we need to empower the students so they can access what they need when they need it,” says Contis. “We’re trying to provide just-in-time software access so students don’t have to plan ahead and figure out when they’re going to visit a physical lab.” 

Many students’ laptops are powerful enough to run the necessary apps, but licensing costs for local execution would be prohibitive. So Contis and his team, collaborating with the university’s Office of Information Technology, took a virtual desktop interface (VDI) approach. Today, students download and install a small-footprint Citrix XenDesktop client and choose the virtual lab for the COE school they attend. They access the labs from the campus wireless network or off-campus networks, and a pool of 20 Dell servers based on Intel® Xeon® processors X5650 and E5520 delivers the apps using a mix of hypervisors: VMware vSphere ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1.

For a full article on Didier Contis’ accomplishments with the Georgia Tech COE, please see http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/case-study/virtualization-georgia-tech-virtual-computer-lab-study.pdf