Hyper V, Quest and Wyse

Our foray into thin clients (a.k.a. VDI) has been anything but organized and smoothe. However, we've finally made some headway on a path that I believe will get us to where we want to be. Where is that you may ask? (Or maybe not...) Well, either way, I'll tell you. BYOT, BYOD, or whatever you want to call the activity of having students and teachers bring their own technology to school for use seems to be the way for education. At least, that's where are the hoopla is for now!

I fully support the idea and think it will be a great way for schools to move into the digital content arena on a bigger scale than we have thus far, speaking of K-12. Universities have seen the advantage of reaching students far and wide and seem to have taken a hold of it sooner. My vision is for us to be able to offer to any student, any time, anywhere, with any device, the same resources that they can find in a lab or on a classroom computer. Even beyond that, having teachers and students alike creating content that is useful, educational and a good learning experience. To enable this, we have do to several things first.

1. Create a method for students/teachers to connect to the network wherever they may be.

2. Create a method for students/teachers to use THEIR devices on the school network.

3. Improve the wireless support in house to enable those methods to work.

We've taken a new approach and are currently testing (successfully so far) using Hyper V and Quest running on Cisco's blade servers. Now, it could be any server, but this will help us reduce energy cost and support. I hope. For the end device in the labs and classrooms will be using Wyse CL10 devices where we have a wired connection and either netbooks or student owned devices in wireless areas.

Our next concern is to improve our wireless offering so that we can meet the demand, create a signed certificate (SSL) to enable the web interface for the Hyper V system, and create an SSID that will force all non-school owned equipment to the VDI web page. In theory, the web page is working. I'm working with StartSSL to get a very cheap *.calallen.org SSL certificate for all our sites and we are also evaluating both Meraki and Meru wireless AP's. We currently have Cisco wireless, but the AP's that we own will not support more than 25 concurrent connections.