Operational Efficiency – How Kingston University delivers a virtual desktop to 25,000 students and staff

Partners are vital to helping Microsoft deliver customer solutions built on the Microsoft platform. I was reminded of this when reading a recent press release from Quest, about Kingston University’s project to to give staff and students virtual access to their university desktop and learning resources from any location, on a wide range of devices, at any time.

With 23,000 students, and 2,000 full-time staff to serve, their project is aiming to create a ‘university without walls’, so that their users can access their files and applications from any of the 9,000 university PCs or from users’ own personal computers – wherever they are.

What caught my eye was this quote from Daniel Bolton, who’s a technical analyst at the University:

"Kingston University has been researching Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions for two-and-a-half years with the aim of providing our staff and students the best solution for flexible access to learning resources regardless of their location. Our aim of achieving a ‘university without walls’ when it comes to flexible virtual access has been truly recognised with Quest vWorkspace. We initially looked into Citrix and VMware solutions, but felt that Quest’s user environment management and personalization features were more advanced."

The whole solution has been deployed on Hyper-V, which is part of Windows Server 2008 R2, and is now the largest planned deployment for both Quest and Microsoft to date. Phase one of implementation is due to complete in October.

You can read the full release on Quest’s website.

Posted by Ian